Cradle to Cradle

I just finished a fantastic book called Cradle to Cradle. The book itself (fantastically) is not made of trees, fully supporting the ideas that are contained within the content of the book itself. The authors feel that, as humans, our notions of consumption and production are fundamentally flawed--to think that we would dream of making stuff that cannot decompose back into the earth! Going to South America´s largest landfill recently (see "biogassing") made me think a lot about consumption, and this book envisions a world where there is no need for landfills, because we will not create "trash."

Yesterday we (the group who visited the landfill) gave a presentation about the biogas plant to the rest of my study abroad group and some outside visitors from Sao Paulo. At the end of the presentation, one woman questioned whether biogas plants might actually encourage waste production because the corporations that have capitalized on this resource now need waste. I am extremely inspired by the biogas plant, but certaintly do not see it as something that should encourage waste production. Ideally, it is a temporary solution to an existing problem, while others of us figure out ways to prevent the problem in the first place. This is what the book, Cradle to Cradle, argues.

My focus for the rest of the semester is permaculture! Permaculture is a holistic approach that seeks to redesign systems so that they function without destroying the natural world, and in fact are modelled after functional systems found in nature. I am very inspired to study this ideology in the context of cities, because each unit of a city affects every other part of the whole as well. As we´ve been seeing lately, most urban problems are because of a conflict between parts of the city. Permaculture is an ideological approach that seeks to design systems where all the different parts cooperate. Imagine a city where waste from certain sectors nourishes others! Many natural systems work this way, and permaculture seeks to study and duplicate this "waste-to-food" concept.

More about this later!

"As Albert Einstein observed, if we are to solve the problems that plague us, our thinking must evolve beyond the level we were using when we created those problems in the first place."
-Cradle to Cradle

Erin