Mind Safari

Dr. Christopher M. Bache has been a professor of Religious Studies at Youngstown State University for almost 30 years as well as an intermittent adjunct faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies. From 2000-2002 he was Director of Transformative Learning at the Institute of Noetic Sciences located outside of San Francisco.
He is the author of “Dark Night, Early Dawn: Steps to a Deep Ecology of Mind”, “Lifecycles: Reincarnation and the Web of Life”, and “The Living Classroom: Teaching and Collective Consciousness”.

It’s not your average science fair when the 16-year-old winner manages to solve a global waste crisis. But such was the case at last May’s Canadian Science Fair in Waterloo, Ontario, where Daniel Burd, a high school student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, presented his research on microorganisms that can rapidly biodegrade plastic.

Plastic, one of the most indestructible of manufactured materials, does in fact eventually decompose. It takes 1,000 years but decompose it does, which means there must be microorganisms out there to do the decomposing.

Could those microorganisms be bred to do the job faster?

That was Daniel’s question which he put to the test by a very simple and clever process of immersing ground plastic in a yeast solution that encourages microbial growth, and then isolating the most productive organisms.

The preliminary results were encouraging, so he kept at it, selecting out the most effective strains and interbreeding them. After several weeks of tweaking and optimizing temperatures Burd was achieved a 43 % degradation of plastic in six weeks, an almost inconceivable accomplishment.
But does this mean that plastic bags are now off the hook and that plastic packaging has been redeemed? Can we continue to use as much of it as we want guilt-free? Plastic is still made from oil, a non-renewable resource. It’s manufacture uses energy and creates pollution in the form of pre-production plastic pellets, aka nurdles, that can escape and cause harm to the marine environment. And unlike paper bags which biodegrade easily and naturally when exposed to the elements, plastic bags will need to be processed in a controlled way at a temperature of 37°C (99°F) because the microbes that break them down don’t exist in abundance in the natural world, certainly not in the cold ocean.

Daniel’s discovery could be good news for the environment, but only if it’s used as a way to break down the plastic waste that already exists and isn’t simply used as an excuse to create more.

And there are other things to think about…the possibility of continued mutation.  Here is a quote from Micheal Crichtons’  famous book “The Andromeda Strain”:

Hall nodded. “National guardsmen could be on the ground, and not be harmed. But the pilot had his aircraft destroyed because the plastic was dissolved before his eyes.”

Is it wise to intervene with mother nature in this way?  What are your thoughts?

Sustainability consultant Chris Prelitz explains the benefits of investing in energy-efficient lighting.

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Talking to Pliny Fisk III–one of the pioneers of the sustainable-design movement–is both inspiring and confounding. In any given sitting Fisk might discuss bio-regional mapping, fly ash concrete, cybernetics, and E.F. Schumacher all in the same dizzying context. It’s difficult to grasp, but that’s because he isn’t following a conventional approach. For him the planet’s prosperity is inextricably linked to its architecture. To make that connection a reality Fisk has long felt the need to smash the status quo, then let everyone else know how to do it themselves. “Part of being a visionary is pushing everybody else’s limits and opening their eyes to opportunities,” says David Lake, principal of Lake-Flato Architects in San Antonio and a former student of Fisk’s. “From Pliny’s perspective, anything is possible.”

At 61 years old Fisk remains as passionate about architecture and the environment as he was as a student at the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1960s. There he got master’s degrees in architecture and landscape architecture under the tutelage of the legendary Ian McHarg. After completing his studies he taught “ecological design” in the School of Architecture at University of Texas at Austin in the early 1970s and became known for a field lab where he and his students built windmills, raised organic vegetables, and designed buildings using local materials. In 1975 Fisk turned his lab into a nonprofit organization called the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems and left the university to “cause commotion” full time.

For the past 30 years the center has developed a four-pronged approach, emphasizing design, master planning, policy and education, and tools (which include educational games and the creation and testing of building materials). Fisk and his wife, Gail Vittori, who joined the team in the late 1970s and is now codirector, have set up solar hot water heater production for poor towns in South Texas, planned sustainable villages in Nicaragua and China, and created several dozen building materials. In the early 1990s the pair also helped to create Austin’s city-sponsored green building ratings program–the first of its kind in the world and a model for the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system. (Vittori currently sits on that organization’s board of directors.) “Our idea was to extend the Austin program from just considering energy conservation and performance to looking at the total flows of inputs and outputs to a building,” she says.

These days Fisk has added a new building system to the center’s repertoire. The GroHome–part of a broader program Fisk calls “Community-Supported Architecture”–was conceived of as a way to offer residents the flexibility to expand their living space with minimal impact to the site, the local landfill, and residents’ daily lives. The construction is based on a series of joints that can be used to erect a variety of structures, from simple lampposts to large meeting halls. Another component of the system is the FatWall, a thick wall that can be cantilevered off the sides of a GroHome or positioned inside the frame for closet space, a home office, or even a bathroom.

Like many Fisk projects, the GroHome embodies more than just a single principle. It’s one element of an integrated system that includes sustainable thinking on a broad and integrated level. “If you look at the GroHome from a planning perspective, you can take the joint all the way up to the region so that you have a sensible way of understanding your footprint,” Fisk says. Indeed the standards within the joints–which Fisk dubs GroJoints–can accept pipe, conduit, dimensional lumber, bamboo, and many other structural members so that builders can adapt and use whatever is locally available. Any given GroHome then becomes a source of information about the region. “As part of a master plan, a building system becomes a way of communicating,” Fisk says. “Manufacturers can understand how a system works so they can cooperate with each other. It’s also an effective way to inventory resources.”

Fisk has always maintained that for a building or a city to be sustainable it must be created from the resources available in its region as well as contribute to the local economy. His contract work for the Environmental Protection Agency in the mid 1990s crystallized this idea (see “The Infinite Grid,” by Andrea Moed, Metropolis, December 1996). At the time Fisk was asked to create a grid map of the country on which he pinpointed natural resource availability, businesses that were distributing those resources, and people who were knowledgeable on how to use the materials; he called these groups area, point, and network resources. By integrating this information, Fisk says, it’s possible to track the economic resources that go into harvesting and transporting a material. It also allows one to see where materials are used and how they’re recycled (or not) after their initial use–a process now widely known as life-cycle analysis.

Currently Fisk and Vittori are in discussions with grassroots organizations in Louisiana and Mississippi about building GroHome communities for displaced Hurricane Katrina survivors. In a sense this represents the culmination of 30 years of work. The GroHome is a technical fix for a housing need, but the larger initiative is a planning opportunity that can involve residents in the rebuilding, provide local jobs, and teach neighborhood businesses about the benefits of green building. “Bucky Fuller said that we’re all born geniuses, and we’re gradually de-geniused by our parents and teachers,” says Bob Berkebile, principal of BNIM Architects in Kansas City. “Pliny wasn’t de-geniused–he never lost the curiosity for lifelong learning.”

An incisive look at the global economic crisis, our flawed response, and the implications for the world’s future prosperity. The Great Recession, as it has come to be called, has impacted more people worldwide than any crisis since the Great Depression. Flawed government policy and unscrupulous personal and corporate behavior in the United States created the current financial meltdown, which was exported across the globe with devastating consequences. The crisis has sparked an essential debate about America’s economic missteps, the soundness of this country’s economy, and even the appropriate shape of a capitalist system.

Few are more qualified to comment during this turbulent time than Joseph E. Stiglitz. Winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics, Stiglitz is “an insanely great economist, in ways you can’t really appreciate unless you’re deep into the field” (Paul Krugman, New York Times). In Freefall, Stiglitz traces the origins of the Great Recession, eschewing easy answers and demolishing the contention that America needs more billion-dollar bailouts and free passes to those “too big to fail,” while also outlining the alternatives and revealing that even now there are choices ahead that can make a difference. The system is broken, and we can only fix it by examining the underlying theories that have led us into this new “bubble capitalism.”

Ranging across a host of topics that bear on the crisis, Stiglitz argues convincingly for a restoration of the balance between government and markets. America as a nation faces huge challenges—in health care, energy, the environment, education, and manufacturing—and Stiglitz penetratingly addresses each in light of the newly emerging global economic order. An ongoing war of ideas over the most effective type of capitalist system, as well as a rebalancing of global economic power, is shaping that order. The battle may finally give the lie to theories of a “rational” market or to the view that America’s global economic dominance is inevitable and unassailable.

For anyone watching with indignation while a reckless Wall Street destroyed homes, educations, and jobs; while the government took half-steps hoping for a “just-enough” recovery; and while bankers fell all over themselves claiming not to have seen what was coming, then sought government bailouts while resisting regulation that would make future crises less likely, Freefall offers a clear accounting of why so many Americans feel disillusioned today and how we can realize a prosperous economy and a moral society for the future.