Designing For The Future, Part 2 (LP&M #10)

I traveled home to Pennsylvania last week. The trip measured a distance of nearly 3,500 kilometres. The Boeing 777 I was a passenger on burns approximately 37 litres of kerosene aeroplane fuel every kilometre, totaling 129,574 litres of fuel for this particular trip. Therefore, on average, throughout the flight, the plane consumed nearly 8 litres of fuel every second. I do not recall ordering 1.3 litres of fossil fuel from the flight attendants each minute, but that is what it cost each of the 365 passengers to bring us so unnaturally fast across the continent of North America.

This act, when viewed this way, feels supremely wasteful. Fossil fuels are a unique luxury that the human race will arguably never know again, and we are squandering them. As one of the 365 on that flight, I did this knowingly, but reframed it and weighed values and my desire to be with my immediate family won out. I make such a trip only once per year, and yet I still do it and think very little of this unsustainable luxury the modern world has grown accustomed to. When will we be forced to slow down? When will the skies be clear of everything devoid of birds and clouds again? When will we, as the collective human race, recognize the need and the richness in settling in place?

Big challenges require big solutions. To echo the sentiments of global climate change activist Bill McKibben, who I had the pleasure of seeing speak twice this term, explains how sometimes reconciliations need to be made to achieve the greater good. The education and exposure to ideas that I am receiving by living so far away from those I love has justified my stay here in Vancouver and with the University of British Columbia. I will one day return to the eastern seaboard of North America, but I know that when I do, I will carry with me things I have learned that have the power to the human establishment transition into a more unpredictable era. 

Life on this planet is embedded in the ecosphere, and as with every complex system, there will always be unknown unknowns. Unfortunately, the old paradigm of a belief in finding a singularity in problems and solutions is a falsity. Unfortunately, mechanical thinking cannot be applied to our immense challenges–with economy and with climate.

Of the many things I have learned in this course, I now understand more fully how challenges associated with sustainability are entirely about collaboration and dynamism. Complex challenges cannot be understood or addressed by one mind's thoughts or one person's actions. Sustainability calls for capacity to adapt and for collaboration throughout all professions and walks of life. True collaboration calls for identifying knowledge in others. It requires a trust in others and in their strengths. Everything is constantly shifting in nature…we must collectively shift with it if we hope to plan for a sustainable human enterprise.

Starting vs. Joining (CityStudio #11)

During the summer of 1998, just after finishing up my year of art school foundations courses at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I began to rethink my decision that a major in illustration was the best route to take. Part of this shift in thought may have come from the fact that I wasn't publishing comic books in my spare time, or transcribing in picture form the frivolities of pop culture instead of writing prose about (topics no less than) overconsumption, but mostly I realized it came from my fear of being self-employed.

I come from a family of teachers, of military servicemen, and of doctors and nurses. Each has joined a school, a branch of the armed forces, or a medical practice. Not one seems to have started or changed such an establishment. Entrepreneurialism, albeit an American ideal, seems to not be in my blood. Some research shows that this trait, at least in part, can be genetic. The cited study, performed by the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology at Kings College in London, states how "37 percent to 48 percent of the tendency to be an entrepreneur is genetic." This is interesting, but I want to know more about the other 63 to 52 percent. 

In a way, I have spent a good part of my life thinking of the science of genetics as a scapegoat or a means by which to occasionally subvert challenges in favor of familiarity and comfort. It is time I begin to think of opportunity and of life in terms of the percentages that do not refer to genetic predisposition.

Last week I spoke of my idea of "establishing a business that creates products with meaning, in a healthy and meaningful way". This idea has already stuck. I do not plan on letting it leave my consciousness. However, I am curious about this threshold that I have not yet fully crossed. Indeed, I have tiptoed into this land of starting over joining, but never with both feet. I have created art and exhibited it (more than once). I have been a part-time freelance designer and photographer. I have picked up my life and moved 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometres) here to graduate school in Vancouver to, in some ways, begin anew…

I feel it is time for part and parcel; time for both feet. The why not has everything to do with fear of the first time and with failure. Yet, I know well how I learn best from making mistakes and revisiting failures. My experiences with CityStudio have afforded me the confidence to seriously consider using both feet to soon take some leaps I have not yet taken. After all, the world needs us to take risks now…to help revert the risks we have burdening it with for generations.

Beyond CityStudio (CityStudio #10)

With only less than a month remaining in the term, my mind has already begun to ponder the what next. There has been much learning, and there will be the first installation of the Long Table Series, but I am from the cloth of those who keep reaching a bit further. With the nearing of each milestone completion, I begin to fix my sights and prepare for the transition into, hopefully, something embodying two steps forward.

Lately, I find myself getting a bit ahead of myself, thinking of work and time beyond acquiring my masters without yet having begun my thesis. This week it happened again.

The surrealist ideas of Dali came to him upon the edges dreams. My ideas, corporeal ideas, commonly come to me as I am jogging in my Finnish runners through the streets of East Van or commuting due West to school by bicycle or back to prepare dinner. It was during a night ride this week that inspired the creation of a document titled, BIG_ideas. In it were the following words:


A business.

Design and manufacture a new kind of rain barrel
Design and manufacture portable apiary toolkits
Design and manufacture _____X_____

Fabricate all items using cradle to cradle principles
Fabricate all items using recycled/repurposed/nontoxic materials
Fabricate locally/source locally

Sell items to city/town/community that seeks implementation of a pilot program
Sell items to address a systemic challenge needing a new paradigm
Sell items with the promise of additional consultation

Consult as an educator
Consult as a community facilitator
Consult as a researcher

Deliver a functional product
Deliver empowerment and new thought
Deliver positive systemic change

Utilize profit to propagate bigger ideas and more positive change…


It appears to be happening. My past schooling and professional experiences as an industrial designer are beginning to step onto the field of my current focus and approach to design. I decided it was time for graduate school because I decided it was time to go bigger. I know well the potential for profundity in the details and in the human-scale, but my pursuit now personifies macro design and the local-, national-, and biospheric-scale. I aim to steer this subconscious stirring into personal growth.

I have tried to steer clear of doing that which people have asked me to do with my current schooling, have thought I was good at for the past decade, but perhaps there is something to embracing some of this. Perhaps this is the point to the exercise Moura Quayle introduced to the CityStudio cohort last week. Answering the questions, "What do you like to do?…What do you dislike doing?" and, in this case, "What do people keep asking you to do that you would rather not do?" has relevance here. Indeed, everything we make comes from somewhere. Embracing aspects of my work in the past could certainly strengthen my ideas of the present.

This big idea of establishing a business that creates products with meaning, in a healthy and meaningful way…then offering not only the product, but the professional capacity to help facilitate change around the product and within communities…begins to build upon my past. It appears it is never too early to begin to think about building, and building upon, legacy.

Designing For The Future, Part 1 (LP&M #9)

In October, I submitted an essay to this year's Tattersfield Scholarship call for entries titled, Embracing Entropy: A Look Into A Modified Design Aesthetic. "Embracing entropy," I argue, "means doing less with more while aligning processes of nature with those of humankind. Embracing entropy ultimately means designing for change, disassembly and reuse, and with a lighter hand." While it was not selected as the winning piece this year, its core message continues to stir within me, especially within the context of this course, Landscape Planning and Management for Sustainable Landscapes.

Landscape planning and management essentially practices projection of land use and development. Sustainable landscapes, as understood throughout this course, are those where human and natural systems can exist in concert while achieving the "highest level of utility, productivity, beauty, and stability." The anticipation of this pairing to produce sustainable landscapes requires that work be performed dynamically and with understanding that ecological systems are open systems, where energies can enter into or leave the system at any given time. Currently, Earth, in both its human and natural systems–the global economy and the climate–is facing unprecedented energy flows that could produce shifts in known paradigms at any given moment.

The global economy has never been so complex and so interconnected as it is today. Complementarily, the CO2 levels in the planet's atmosphere have never been so great during the existence of humanity. Without belaboring the details of how these systems have arrived at this juncture, the consequence is that each are currently geared more for collapse than we have ever known them to be. Does, then, a status quo for ways of doing business still exist for professions embedded within each of these systems? Furthermore, if it is true that professional practice profits primarily from standardization, how might the future of the professions of planning and landscape architecture be sustained? I would argue that answers for each of these questions lie within the embracing entropy argument.

Future constraints of the planning and landscape architecture professions can be simple to envision. There will continually exist less raw resources (as populations rise and demands increase), including both the human construct of money and the physical construct of resources such as oil…and there will exist a climate with increasing unpredictability. With less to build with and more to build for, a new status quo will arise. Professional standardization, in pursuit of profit and economic sustainability, will most likely find its closest ally in nature. In place of manufactured (and resource-intensive) pastoral and modern aesthetics, such workhorse landscape typologies as reconstructed wetlands and riparian corridors could become poster children for development. They could offer a glimpse of this new aesthetic that allows natural processes take care of themselves and the landscape in our rapidly changing world.

Before the advent of reductionist thought brought on by the Age of Enlightenment, the belief that nature knew best was more prevalent throughout the collective global society. The pendulum swing may have taken a few centuries to complete, but it appears that it's headed back this way. The seemingly inevitable transition into new paradigms for climate, resources, and economy requires an embracing of this ancient ideal.

Delivering Inclusion With Rain Barrels (CityStudio #9)

For the second time during the last month, I have heard the same key piece of information regarding the hearts and minds of Vancouverites. Of all the categories, including such prevailing topics as affordability in housing and daily life, people who live here rate inclusion, or a having a sense of belonging, as their primary indicator of happiness. According to Vancouver Foundation's 2010 Vital Signs report, "regardless of our religion, race, colour, age or gender, we [Vancouverites] all want to feel that we belong, and can make a contribution to our society. By developing connections with each other, we build trust, and this is what keeps our community strong and vital."

City Councillor Andrea Reimer, during her second visit to CityStudio, first brought attention to this document and its statistic. Just this week, Jennifer Bailey, the city's Water Quality & Conservation Program Manager, echoed this information. She recently attended a workshop on community-based social marketing where many presented case studies suggested how people embody a very strong need to belong. A large body of research has illustrated how social approval of our behaviour is generally quite important to people. In contemporary North American society, this need has grown more acute as people increase their use of computers and cars and further physically isolate themselves from their communities.

The ironic beauty of the first of The Long Table Series events, our contribution to CityStudio, is how we plan to turn another aspect of social isolation in Vancouver–the ever present rain–into something that can help to inspire the opposite. The event will include opportunities for the community to gather to meet, learn, and collaborate around practical projects for engaging directly with water quality and conservation. At the heart of this will be the rain barrel, an object that transcends scale with regards to its ability to impact water quality.

At the residential scale, rain barrels physically connect their users to the source, inspiring awareness about consumption. They defer use of a potable supply of water and grow gardens with stored rain. At the city and regional scale, they have the collective power to defer rainfall from the storm sewer system, stop combined sewage overflow events, and keep False Creek clean and healthy for the likes of spawning herring, feeding whales, and sporting humans.

Each aspect of the event will be framed in a way that demonstrates social approval of the desired behaviour. Rather than motivate people to act by offering a prize (such as a free rain barrel), which is temporary and is shown to not compel them to consider acting differently, we will connect people to each other in the name of health and healthy, bountiful local waterways. Suitably, the first of the series will be known as, Water Table: Collaborating to grow community with harvested rainwater. It will bring the high level concepts of what the city wants to become the greenest to our own backyards so that we all can become part of the solution.

Lessons From Canada's Most Trusted (LP&M #8)

A few days ago, I saw Dr. David Suzuki speak in person for the first time. “The Global Eco-crisis: Is it too late?” was the title of his sold-out talk, and that had me a bit worried. I was not worried of becoming overwhelmed as one might when they begin to assess the health of the ecosphere, but rather worried that I might not hear of any hope during a time in which I no longer wish to use the dire diatribe as a means to inspire change.

"Is it too late?" he asked. "It is late, very late," he replied "but it will never be too late for me." For the entire length of the speech, lasting well over an hour, he explained why the fight is still very real and how we should go about taking up arms. He spoke directly to the youth, reminding us that the future is simply a human construct and how it is this trait, the human trait to plan ahead, that makes our species unique. He decried it is imperative the youth become more politically involved because of how they have more of a future to lose.

Like the idea of a future, the economy is also a human construct. David Suzuki spoke of the things that are truly valued–things regarding family, experience, and the natural world. Such things, things we value more than any manufactured good such as the cherished kitchen cabinets his father made as a gift for David and his wife's first home, are viewed as worthless externalities with regard to the economy. Just as the nonexistence of the future could be argued, the same could be said about the economy. The laws of nature, on the contrary, are irrefutable and unchanging.

"In a city," he reminded us, "our perception of the world changes…[and] it's easy to think we are unique creatures where we only have to worry about our jobs…to buy the things we want. In cities, the highest priority is the economy." Furthermore, because money "doesn't represent anything but itself" and those in power only seem to be representing money and the corporate cause, the public must be those who take up the call in defense of natural systems, of biodiversity, and of healthy air, water, and soil.

Despite his ability to make eloquent connections between human culture and the natural world, his lecture did not present to me any new scientific findings or conclusions. His only hint at ecosystem services was a singular mention of the phrase, "…ecosystems and the services they can provide." However, all of this did not leave me at a loss. Rather, I stood up from my seventh row Chan Centre seat a bit taller during the generous ovation. If David Suzuki, Canada's most trusted person and famed environmentalist, was not telling me anything I didn't already know about our struggle to reverse the damage we have done to our planetary home, perhaps I have been brought up to speed. If ecosystem services were not quite mentioned, perhaps this way of thinking is indeed vanguard. I left feeling it was time to conclude my broad sweep of knowledge regarding this essential concern. It is time to focus, to dig deeper, and to develop my contribution.

Grey Whales In The Sewers (CityStudio #8)

How does one do it? How might someone psychologically connect the water a family flushes down its drains, or lets pass over its roof and directly into the storm sewer, with the grey whale? During May of last year, a mature grey whale visited False Creek presumably to feed on some of the herring that returned to spawn here a few years prior. False Creek, for most of its early history until halfway into this century, was an industrial hub for Vancouver. Sawmills, ports, and rail yards for the historic Canadian Northern Pacific Railway and the Great Northern Railway companies dominated this landscape and with heavy industry came heavy pollution. Such industry no longer resides here. Instead, its property has been replaced by glass towers, backdropped by the arboreal vastness to the north.

The grey whale, a keystone species, and the herring should proudly symbolize hope. Development is not innately nature-adverse, as the decisions we make in its name can easily be. We live in an era of mass extinction and rising consumption. It is hopeful to see creatures that we have kept at bay for so long in the name of progress, return to a place they called home long before we did.

Industry will inevitably return however. As all fossil fuels peak and continue to grow more expensive, the world will again look not so small and easy to traverse, and industry will return to the region. When this happens, what waterways will we allow it to populate? Does it matter? Water is all connected and water is patient. It will take its time flowing back towards the Pacific if it needs to, and with it, our pollution it will bring.

Before we forecast this era, it would be in the best interest of the grey whale and their fellow creatures if we begun to connect something with those who live in glass towers and beyond…All water is connected. Since the earliest life, Earth has been a blue planet. For hundreds of millions of years its water has been the same water, cycling over and over and over through the hydrologic cycle. Clean water means life for whales and fish and humans. Relearning this idea, the idea of all water being one water, is central to the goal of keeping water clean.

The iconic rain that is Vancouver's winter was transpired by the vast temperate rainforest to the north. Countless trees perspiring as they grow taller and thicker provides the moisture that becomes the snow that falls on our olympic slopes. This snowpack is what feeds our three protected watersheds–Capilano, Coquitlam and Seymour–which provide us the water we drink from our taps, wash our whites and darks, and sprinkle our prized lawns. This same rain, too warm for it to still be snow, also falls upon our roofs and runs off of our roads. Drains, both those in our homes and those in our streets try to capture all of this used water. Yet, much of it finds its way into the streams that run unseen beneath our feet, into False Creek, off to the Burrard Inlet, and out into the Pacific Ocean. Here the cycle begins again as clouds form and drift eastward, yet again, over Earth's largest body of water.

There are hurdles of scale, but all water can be visualized as one water. Imagining can lead to believing…believing to understanding…understanding to caring. Grey whales do not travel our sewers, but we can imagine them there, hunting for schools of tasty amphipods.