Co.Exist

Nature Is Bad For The Economy: This Street Art Makes You Question Your Values

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:00:30 +0000

Two weeks ago, I saw one of the bumper stickers you can see here. A shock of irony sped through my retinas and a jolt of truth shot out my toes. I thought, "Who finally said--succinctly and artfully--what so many people ramble on endlessly about or refuse to acknowledge at all?" I knew I wasn’t alone in my wondering. So I sought out the artist, someguy, to ask some questions about his project titled The Economy. Here are excerpts from our email interaction.

Co.Exist: Shouldn’t we just lay back and enjoy the decay? Why point out the irony?

Someguy: I’ve considered this.

When did everyone get so uptight?

You can buy pizza that has hotdogs embedded in the crust. Like, around the edges. We have the Sham-Wow and the Slanket and Jersey Shore. I don’t understand how anyone can be uptight in paradise.

So what spurred you to do this?

The source of many of my projects comes from a growing unease with how politicians (on both sides) create narratives to fit their agenda. We’re told what’s important, and why. At the end of the day, we actually believe that we have opinions. In this case, I was struck by the framing of any policy argument that it was "good" or it was "bad" for the economy. Rather, I’d like, just once, for us to make decisions based on what’s good for people. We are, after all, people. (Sorry, I keep forgetting that corporations are people, too).

How does the larger narrative of your life inform these works?

I find people are hypocrites (myself included). We vote against our best interests. We paint our faces and passionately support our favorite sports team, but won’t protest against warrantless wiretapping. We want to save the world, but not if it’s a hassle. We say religion shouldn’t play a role in an election, but then accuse Obama of being Muslim (which, last time I checked, wasn’t illegal). We trample people while madly rushing to buy things on sale. Observing this behavior--which seems to be accelerating--informs many of my projects.

What’s been the most interesting reaction to this work?

Most people get the Economy project right away. I did, however, witness (on someone’s Facebook wall), an entire argument ensue in which a person decided to argue that the sayings were incorrect. He pointed out how they were each wrong, and why. I’m not sure if he took offense, or what, but he wasn’t ready to be wrong about anything. So, back and forth the comments went. I never chimed in, being more interested in the dialog than the outcome.

Regardless of your intentions, do you feel like you changed anything with this series?

No. Yes. Maybe. I have such an overwhelming sense that we’re heading in the wrong direction. And I don’t mean this from a political leadership standpoint, but as a society. We. Us. We’re heading the wrong way. We measure GDP, but not happiness. We think we’re number one, but really, that’s just in average number of hours worked per week … we work the most of any industrialized country. Hooray.

People who know me best might characterize me as a pessimist. But, I’d argue that I’m a closet optimist, because regardless of the odds, I keep trying to change things. All it takes is for one person to change their thinking, and then another will, and eventually, change will happen.

Anything else you want to say?

I’m often brought back to a statement (T-shirt? Poster?) that was passed around the web a few years back. It said (something like) "Designers can’t change the world. Go work at a soup kitchen you pretentious fuck". Despite all that I do, I can’t argue with this.

Someguy is offering a doorway through which people can pass and confront the faulty logic on which much of our economy is actually built. That may be a pretentious goal, but it’s a worthy one. And while it’s not soup, it is certainly a nourishing food that we don’t get served nearly enough.

Breeding Wheat To Grow Where Other Plants Can’t

Wed, 16 May 2012 21:00:48 +0000

We need to nearly double the amount of food we grow by mid-century if 9 billion people are going to have enough to eat. Yet most of the world’s prime farmland is already planted. The rest of the available land tends to lie under forests, or suffer from problems that keep it fallow. But feeding the world will mean redefining what is "arable" land.

Earlier this year, researchers in Australia successfully pushed out that definition a bit further. By crossing an ancestor of ancient wheat with today’s commercial wheat, they have bred a strain that thrives in saline soils, expanding where the grain can be grown. Wheat is already the world’s most widely planted cereal grain, covering about 17% of all cultivated land, and supplying more calories and protein in the world’s diet than any other.

Yet wheat struggles in soils with high concentration of salts. And too-salty soil now covers an area roughly equivalent to that of the U.S., about 3.8 million square miles, mostly in the arid–semiarid regions of Asia, Australia, and South America, but they are spreading. As we pump billions of tons of irrigated water onto the land, and deplete groundwater reserves that pull seawater into underground aquifers, the situation is worsening in many of the same areas where we need to grow more food in the future: arid regions with low rainfall.

Researchers from CSIRO Plant Industry (part of Australia’s national science agency) and other institutions set out to create a variety of durham wheat, the kind used in pasta and couscous, that could thrive in these soils. The scientists pulled off the trick by introducing a gene from one of wheat’s wild cousins to draw out sodium molecules from water moving up the plant’s water system, known as xylem, before reaching the leaves. The new crossbreed yields 25% more grain from saline soils than conventional varieties, according to a study published in Nature Biotechnology. These new miracle wheat plants can carry on photosynthesizing in salty soils despite sodium molecules that would otherwise interfere. In non-saline soils, no drop in yields was observed, so they can be planted everywhere.

Next up will be breeding the gene into other varieties of wheat. One day, amber waves of grain may grow where few other plants dare to put down roots.

5 Commitments To Become Part Of A Solution To The World’s Problems

Wed, 16 May 2012 18:30:14 +0000

Everywhere we look today destructive floods, windstorms, heat waves, and other extreme weather events seem to be on the rise. Joblessness continues to haunt us. And, economic inequity remains excessive. Will new policies solve these problems? Are new technologies the ticket? Does the answer lie in conclusive victories for conservative or liberal political ideologies?

Actually, none of the above will do the trick. More of the same type of technologies and policies, no matter what their ideological bent, will only make things worse.

To resolve a problem you must first understand its cause. The roots of our troubles are simple, yet for most of us they are completely hidden from view. We have been living in a dream world. Our behavior, and the actions of society as a whole, has been shaped by fundamental misjudgments about how the planet functions and what it means to live a good and decent life. To address today’s escalating suite of challenges, we must overcome the erroneous perspectives that have led us to this predicament. At the most fundamental level, this requires a shift from responding to the world exclusively through the perspective of extreme individualism--which includes acting only to satisfy our personal and organizational goals and desires--to meeting our needs by caring for an expansive "we"--the many people, organisms, and natural processes that make life possible and worthwhile. Five interrelated commitments can help us make the shift from "Me" to "We."

1: Always strive to see the ecological, social, and economic systems of which you are part

One of the reasons things seem to be falling apart is that many people pursue their individual self-interest without considering the context in which they exist. An indisputable fact of life is that our survival, and the survival of all other life-forms on Earth, is possible only because we are enmeshed within a complex web of interdependent ecological and social systems. The air you breathe, the water you drink, and the food you eat are created by complex ecological processes that are driven by the Earth’s climate system. Your mental health and personal well-being are determined by your social relationships. Yet, too often we ignore or deny this reality. This always leads to trouble. The first commitment each of us must make is to undertake the shift from "me-focused" to "we-focused." What is required to stabilize and eventually restore the climate, economy, and social well-being is to see the systems that we are part of.

2: Be accountable for all of the consequences of your actions on those systems.

Given the precarious conditions of the planet today, almost every action we take affects the interlocking systems we are part of in some way, now or in the future. However, few of us spend much time considering the many ways in which our actions might affect the systems we depend on for life. Instead we pursue our own self-interests without regard to their direct or indirect, immediate or long-term impacts. But climate disruption, economic collapse, and growing inequity have unequivocally shown this cultural belief to be wrong. We must always acknowledge the law of cause and effect and work hard to account for all of the possible consequences of our actions on the systems of which we are a part.

3: Clarify the moral principles you will abide by when responding to the impacts on the systems of which you are a part.

As your awareness expands of how your actions might affect the social and ecological systems that make life possible, you must decide how to respond. What do you stand for and how do you want to live your life from this point forward? Answering these questions requires the adoption of a clear set of moral principles. Morality isn’t about sanctimonious preachy stuff. It involves real-world decisions about what your duties and responsibilities are to other people, which behaviors are fair and unfair, and which are just and unjust. One of the most universally held moral precepts is to "do no harm." This means that any action that causes unjustifiable human suffering and death is morally wrong.

4: Realize that you are a trustee of the planet and take responsibility for the continuation of all life.

The pressures on the planet today are so extensive that many scientists believe humanity has entered a new geological era called the Anthropocene. This is the first epoch in history when human activities, not natural processes, will determine the fate of the Earth. If our actions will now decide the future of our planet, like it or not, we are each a trustee with the responsibility to ensure the continuation of all life on Earth.

5: Break free from the false beliefs that control your life and your organization and choose your own destiny.

Even though your perceptions and behaviors are strongly influenced by your upbringing and today’s dominant cultural worldview, it is important to realize that you have the capacity to change your thinking and behavior at any time. You are not forever committed to outdated, harmful beliefs and habits. This is incredibly empowering knowledge. It means you can start to do no harm to the social and ecological systems you are part of any time you like.

All social change happens one person at a time. This means the place to start to address climate change, the economic downturn, and growing inequity is with you. As many other people make a similar pledge, the tide will turn, and effective practices, technologies, and policies will emerge that will set the world on a more stable, secure, and sustainable path.

Lemonopoly: An Online Game That Trades In Real-World Lemons

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:00:31 +0000

California’s Bay Area has a lot of lemons; there are 3,000 lemon trees in San Francisco alone. Many of the lemons go to waste, either because there are too many to handle (take it from someone who knows) or they are too difficult to access. And even though there are plenty of willing lemon consumers, most lemon tree owners don’t take the time to find them.

Lemonopoly, an online game that emerged from San Francisco’s Creative Currency hackathon, aims to ensure that no lemon goes unused--and that the Bay Area’s lemon supply continues to grow. Designed by Code for America fellow Chacha Sikes and software programmer Anselm Hook over the course of a weekend, the game pits different cities in the Bay Area--San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley--in a quest to rack up the most points. Whichever city has the most points at the end of the game (it will run for two months starting this summer) wins bragging rights.

If you have a lemon tree and want to sign up, the game will first ask a series of questions--i.e. the variety of lemons you have, whether your tree produces edible fruit, and whether you would share your lemons with local foragers, marmalade producers, convenience stores, and others. Then your lemon tree ends up on the Lemonopoly map (you can see it here in black and white, but the actual version will be in color). Non-lemon tree owners can also sign up and offer their services, such as fruit-picking and marmalade making.

Each action performed in the game gets a certain amount of points. The exact point mechanism isn’t quite ready, but a public scoring table will be available in the coming weeks. "If I added a tree, that’s a certain amount of points, or I could teach a class for X amount of points," explains Sikes. "If you did a lemon trade between neighborhoods, that would give you extra bonus points."

So why would anyone participate in Lemonopoly? There’s civic pride, of course, and also the potential to meet neighbors, gain new lemon recipes, and trade in lemons. San Francisco would need about 12,000 lemon trees to produce the 461 tons of lemons it consumes each year, and it’s not out of the question to think that Lemonopoly’s game mechanics could help the city inch closer to that number. A city that produces all of its own lemons is far from self-sufficient, but it’s a start.

If the initial round of the game is successful, Sikes and Hook may make it an annual project. Other abundant local produce items like plums and figs could also be included in the competition.

"Augmented reality tools [like Lemonopoly] allow you to see what’s possible in the place where your brain sort of breaks and you can’t visualize things," says Sikes. "We’re showing people an option to have a slightly different economic system based on sharing."

Steampunking An Old Building To Make It More Efficient

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:00:24 +0000

Steampunk, a genre of literature that takes place in a steam-engine powered world often containing futuristic VIctorian innovations, has inspired movies, music, and an entire lifestyle. (Need some clothes? Check out the Steampunk Emporium.) A lot of steampunk consists of fanciful steam-powered aviator goggles, but sometimes real Victorian innovations are futuristic enough that they should be restored and used instead of modern ones. That’s what happened at the newly-steampunked San Francisco Mint, also known as the Old United States Mint.

The Mint--one of the few large buildings to survive the 1906 earthquake--generated coins until 1937. In 2003, the federal government sold it to the city of San Francisco to turn into a museum (the Museum of the City of San Francisco). That’s where architecture firm HOK came in.

"The Mint is this 19th century historic building that had a lot of unfortunate contemporary renovation done in the 1960s and 1970s. Our team peeled off these layers to find the old Mint and the old systems," explains Zorana Bosnic, Sustainable Design Director at HOK. "Although as a genre steampunk is better understood in design, art, literature, and movies, if you think about it, it’s about celebrating the innovation of the 19th century that’s deeply rooted in that kind of technology."

Case in point: After removing the old layers of the building, the HOK team discovered that the Mint had five foot thick walls and basically was a giant thermal mass, making it naturally heat efficient. The Mint was also entirely reliant on natural ventilation. "If you think of the kind of industrial conditions in the Mint and how that system functioned then, surely we can find ways for that to be a prevailing system now," says Bosnic.

But of course, years of thinking that new is always better made some of the Mint’s features difficult to restore. The windows that helped provide natural ventilation were all sealed, and at some point a dropped ceiling was installed. "You would walk into spaces and feel like it’s any other office building with a dark, dropped ceiling. A lot of that that had to be taken out in order to try and restore it," says Bosnic.

There’s one 19th-century leftover from the Mint that was perfectly intact: the building itself (something of a rarity post-1906 earthquake). The bottom slab of the building was made with a well-reinforced mat-slab foundation. There’s also a trench around the structure--the thinking being that in a seismic event, you have to allow the entire building to move to preserve it.

That’s exactly what happened in the 1906 earthquake. Everything around the building was destroyed, and legend says that the entire Mint moved by two feet without causing any damage. "Those are the things where you get excited. It’s the 19th century and they already thought of what we now know as the base isolation system which is now done with steel and a lot more technology," says Bosnic. "It’s really important to rediscover that type of resilience."

The Mint is still under renovation. No word yet on an opening date for the museum.

What Makes A Happy City?

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:00:14 +0000

We know that beautiful, well-designed cities make for happy citizens. But there are other factors that go into making a happy urban population. Ericsson’s Consumer Lab recently put out a report (PDF) looking at what makes a city a desirable (or undesirable) place to live.

The report, which surveyed residents of 13 cities around the world, came up with a number of findings. Among them:

People are most satisfied with their lives in Stockholm, Mumbai, Johannesburg, New York, Tokyo, London, and Los Angeles. They are least satisfied in Hong Kong and Seoul (despite a lot of connectivity in those cities). Almost half of those surveyed said they’re satisfied overall, while 25% aren’t.
50% of city denizens use smartphones to connect to the Internet every day--an activity that helps them deal with unpredictable aspects of city life (like traffic).
Women are generally happier than men, and students and white-collar workers are unsurprisingly happier than the unemployed.
Young people are happier than older people in Cairo and Seoul. In Mumbai, Stockholm, and Tokyo, older people are happier.
People feel most trapped in the proverbial concrete jungles of Mumbai, Cairo, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Seoul. Citizens are less claustrophobic in Stockholm, Moscow, Tokyo, and New York.
Traffic and parking causes more stress than almost anything in most major cities. According to Ericsson, access to data (i.e. real-time transit schedules, information about bike lanes, and traffic data) is the only thing that can alleviate this stress--besides better city planning, of course. It’s this reliance on data that leads to smartphones being used more often during rush hour than any other time.
Smartphones also alleviate rush hour stress by allowing people to catch up on news, organize leisure activities, listen to music, and send email.

Take all of this with a grain of salt; a telecommunication company like Ericsson is bound to come up with data showing how smartphones make us incredibly happy. Still, it’s not hard to believe. Smartphones are distractions, and anything that can make a painful commute more tolerable will lead to more content citizens.

Ma Jun Keeps Your iPhone From Killing People

Wed, 16 May 2012 12:00:58 +0000

"Beijing was such a different city," says Ma Jun, China’s preeminent environmental watchdog, remembering the capital as it was during his childhood. "There were so few cars, I could walk in the middle of the road. In the summer, the streetlamps attracted swirling bugs. I loved those bugs: crickets, praying mantis, all kinds of beetles." The 44-year-old pauses. "I also have a vivid memory of dazzling sunlight coming out of the sky. Today, the sky is different."

Ma Jun is Fast Company’s #1 Creative Person in Business. Click here to browse the full list.

An environmental researcher by trade, Ma spent years chronicling China’s ecological catastrophes. Some of what he witnessed was inexorable and slow, like the graying of the Beijing sky; last December, the World Health Organization ranked Beijing 1,035th, out of 1,100 international cities, in air quality. Other results of his country’s unfettered growth were horrific, like the massive flooding of the Yangtze in 1998, after years of deforestation and soil erosion. Eventually, he decided that merely telling the story was not enough. "As a media person, you look to expose the problem," he says, "but you can’t stop there-—people are looking for answers."

Ma founded the not-for-profit Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) in 2006. Since then, more than anyone else in China, Ma has channeled the power of the Internet and the optimism of China’s younger generation into a force for environmental change. Working with a devoted national network of young volunteers, Ma and his nine full-time staffers have compiled an open-source online database of water, air, and hazardous-waste pollution records—-in the country that generates the world’s highest emissions. Those records are damning: Over five years, IPE volunteers have helped hunt down some 97,000 records of factories operating in violation of China’s green laws. And those efforts lead to change.

"When I look at China’s environmental problems, the real barrier is not lack of technology or money," he says. "It’s lack of motivation. The motivation should come from regulatory enforcement, but enforcement is weak and environmental litigation is near to impossible. So there’s an urgent need for extensive public participation to generate another kind of motivation." Ma has become expert at using his database to create that motivation, especially when it comes to helping global companies police their suppliers.

His methods have won over a number of name-brand global companies that rely on Chinese manufacturing. Megan Murphy, Walmart’s international corporate-affairs manager, says, "As a result of using this database, we identified factories that need improvement and proactively worked with them to make positive changes." After Walmart signed on with IPE, back in 2008, other large manufacturers were quick to follow. European and Japanese brands are the most avid consumers of Ma’s data, but U.S. companies including Coca-Cola, GE, Levi’s, Microsoft, and Nike also rely on IPE. "He has pushed local officials to report their environmental data and forced multinationals to be accountable for their environmental practices," says Elizabeth C. Economy, the Council on Foreign Relations’ head of Asia studies and author of The River Runs Black, a book that chronicles how China’s environmental problems imperil its future. "In the process, Ma Jun has become one of the true pioneers of China’s environmental movement."

In "The Other Side of Apple," Ma intercut images of launch events and happy consumers with the largely hidden repercussions of manufacturing iPads and iPods on the environment and factory workers.

A couple of years ago, Ma began what would prove to be a long and difficult journey to push one particularly significant corporation to confront problems created by its Chinese suppliers: Apple. In 2009, his team began to notice several cases of health problems due to heavy-metal pollution being reported in local newspapers. "To our surprise, the source wasn’t mostly mines or government-operated smelters," he says, "but factories manufacturing global IT equipment."

Around the same time, reports began to surface about factory workers suffering nerve damage after exposure to a chemical known as n-hexane, which was used in a solution to clean touch screens. Since most Chinese factories working with international corporations are operated by contractors, Ma and company had to do some sleuthing to connect the plants with their global brands. (Not every tie required Sherlock Holmes’s powers of deduction: Some factories brag of their supplier relationships on their websites.) By April 2010, Ma had discovered 29 major tech brands using factories with hazardous operations. Eventually, Ma’s team learned that the factory with n-hexane health issues was operated by a Taiwanese company called Wintek, which had been contracted to manufacture touch screens for Apple.

Ma is a natural problem solver, dedicated and coolly rational. Those are critical personality traits for effective advocates in China, where aggressive tactics like sit-ins and demonstrations are quickly met with government crackdowns. Ma’s strategy is calmer. His first step is to contact corporate decision makers, show them the data, and make an energetic argument about the benefits of proactive change. He’s naturally cooperative, more of a Paul Newman–style activist than Ralph Nader.

In the case of the tech polluters, Ma helped organize a coalition of Chinese NGOs known as the Green Alliance to pressure the 29 companies with letters to their CEOs, including Steve Jobs. Many of the violators, including big firms like Siemens, were willing to engage with IPE. Apple, however, repeatedly refused to even confirm that it had any relationship with the factories cited, claiming that details of its supply chain were proprietary information. As part of his efforts, Ma even penned a second letter to Jobs that was coauthored by Jia Jingchuan, a 20-something worker in Wintek’s factory who was hospitalized for 10 months following n-hexane exposure. This missive, too, was ignored.

There is, of course, a point at which Ma’s patience ends--and Apple had triggered it. In response, Ma unfurled all his weapons, starting with social media, which, especially in China, can be a powerful way to direct outrage at companies ignoring their responsibilities. "If you publish something in traditional media, it’s one way," he says. "With social media, we get all this info coming back from those who read our posts." But Ma also knows the power of traditional media; in January 2011, he released to several newspapers a report called "The Other Side of Apple," in which his coalition unveiled its data on factories that manufacture for Apple, as well as the company’s reluctance to address those practices. Ma also released a video he had produced, which in true muckraking fashion, interspersed clips from Apple launch events with footage of young workers suffering from n-hexane poisoning. A few weeks later, Apple published its own supplier-responsibility progress report, which for the first time confirmed the case of the poisoned workers. It did not, however, respond to Ma’s reports of environmental pollution. In turn, Ma and his coalition of environmental organizations launched a special investigation into pollution in Apple’s supply chain.

Apple’s stonewalling abated just one week after Tim Cook’s ascension to CEO last August. Hours before Ma was set to release "The Other Side of Apple II," the results of his follow-up investigation into the company’s factories, an Apple VP told Ma’s group that it was open to a phone conference. Two weeks later, in mid-September, Apple reps met with IPE for the first time; ultimately, they agreed to work together. Through the fall, subsequent meetings in Cupertino, San Francisco, and Beijing hammered out details of Apple’s oversight of its suppliers, culminating in its 2012 supplier-responsibility progress report, which named more than 100 suppliers and cited environmental audits into 14 of them. Ma’s Green Alliance will independently verify that suppliers comply with environmental laws.

IPE’s campaign raised pressure on Apple throughout the world and earned Ma the prestigious Goldman Prize, for his grassroots efforts to protect the environment, for 2012. Apple also consented to inspections of some of the factories in its supply chain by an industry-funded group called the Fair Labor Association. The FLA released its report in late March, assessing problems with the dismal working conditions at assembly factories operated by Foxconn. "People cannot get involved in a significant way without data and transparency," says Ma, who finds Apple’s moves promising, none more than its agreement in April to a joint audit of a circuit-board factory with IPE.

One Sunday evening in late March, a casually dressed crowd, mostly graduate students and NGO workers in their 20s and 30s--about half Chinese, half expats--waits patiently for Ma to speak inside the auditorium of the Institute Français in Beijing. A slim French woman in a black suit introduces him as "courageous and influential" before handing him a microphone. The topic of his presentation, coinciding with World Water Day, is "Water Challenges and Green Choices."

As a speaker, Ma is no Mike Daisey, for better and for worse. His voice carries a touch of sadness, and his appeal is not highly emotional. He tells no singular tear-jerking stories, and his slides are factual: "300 million rural Chinese don’t have access to safe drinking water," reads one; "12 million tons of crops are contaminated by heavy metals," says another.

But afterward, one-on-one, he comes alive. Two-dozen people with questions form a line. Ma bows slightly in greeting, then listens to each with absolute intensity. Alternating between Chinese and English, he fields questions about supply-chain management, student environmental groups, and sewage treatment. This is not a corporate boardroom, but one day some of these young people may go on to do extraordinary things. If that happens, Ma will have made meaningful connections. He stays for 45 minutes, energetic and unhurried. The local papers sometimes call Ma "a warrior," but in person his gentleness, thoroughness, and attention to small things shine through. He can’t wait until the brilliant sunlight shines on Beijing with regularity again.