In the midst of an environmental crisis, climate change, natural catastrophes and pathogenic outbreaks, age of Anthropocene is shaping our daily practices and the environment that we live in. Human population is on a critical turn to make a paradigm shift in their lifestyle. Because the system that we built our foundations is posing thread to biodiversity of fauna and flora that we share this habitat together. As if the resources that we relied upon were endless, we are not only disrespectful to other species but also far away from making a radical change in our inherited paradigm. Circular energy structure is innate to nature, but humankind had adapted an alternative model in which nature is registered as a cheap and endless resource to get utilized. Our financial system is called linear economy and simply based on taking, making and wasting.
Main reason of ecologic crisis as industrial revolution and capitalist economy in subsequent, merely appreciates economic growth on the expense of other life forms. This pattern of exploitation of nature can be traced back to the roots of imperialism.
Colonization and Consequences
Transportation networks were built from overseas to Europe, indigenous people were either enslaved and natural resources of their land were exploited. Forced labor were mostly unpaid, their land was taken over and natural resources were extracted to be turned into goods and sold as commodity. Coloniality, the central feature of which Is the categorization and hierarchical classification of differences, leading to the suppression, devaluing, subordination, or even destruction of forms of knowledge and being that do not conform to the dominant form of modernity. Coloniality cemented the dichotomy between the human / civilized (European) world further classified in terms of gender, and the nonhuman / uncivilized (Lugones 2010a, 2010b, Escobar 2018, 94). Exploitation became an apparatus of treating resources. After the accumulation of exponential growth in capital by means of concentration of wealth, a new financial model has arisen: Capitalism. Françoise Vergès says: Capitalism is responsible for producing waste. Among highest GDP countries of %16 of the world population they are creating one third of solid waste.
Human-centric point of view is served to dominate nature throughout the history; biodiversity has been seen as a resource to extract in non-circular one-way exploitation model. Jason Moore refers capitalist ideology and production model as “transforming web of life into production” and mentions unpaid workforce as a pedestal surplus.
Institutionalization subsequently followed economic growth. Autocratic regimes, top down schemes and unilateral structures declines sustainability due to their extractive, non-inclusive aspect. What nature has in its own ecosystem is an organic circular mechanism where every living being can cooperate with another being (e.g. symbiosis) without harming each other. Eventually, because of financial system and governing policies that were built on colonization trajectories fixated the damage that was given to the indigenous communities and environment.
Climatologist Jerry Mahlman’s hockey stick graph illustrates how rapidly greenhouse gas emissions rose temperature anomalies after industrial revolution. Industrial revolution brought new tools of production and new class formations into society. Innovations created upon potential demand.
Do we really need variety of technologies at the expense of life forms? Rivers, mountains, oceans and forests are living entities and holding habitat to many species. Rooted in extraction economies, our industrial design and production principles are taking advantage of these entities with building dams, lodging and mining to manufacture the products and services that we don’t need but consume anyways. Recovering from damage that is given by factory farming and monocultural agriculture practices, requires systematic effort for remediation of our natural resources. Face of the earth is covered with landfill and incinerating this disposal waste contributes to CO2 emissions as well. Marine life is intoxicated by petroleum leakage, nuclear and plastic waste. Environmental organizations and certificates are mostly far away from protection yet utilized by some corporations for greenwashing their carbon offset trajectories. Citing from Belgian thinker Isabelle Stengers, she sees “disastrous merger of big business and big green (Klein, 2014: 191)” or neocolonialist character of many conservationist strategies as missed opportunity.
Exractive practices are most likely disguised in green facade to hide their true nature. For example, paper recycling label FSC is almost on every carton-based package product today. Particularly FSC MIX label is very common, indicating used material is a mixture of recycled and non-recycled paper. However, when it comes to find where does non-recycled material comes from, we see direct connection of ongoing industrial logging practices exercised in amazon rainforests by replacing hundred years old trees with cheap and easy to grow eucalyptus trees.
Amazon rainforests are under threat of deforestation by monoculture replacement such as eucalyptus, soy and palm. Soy goes to livestock feed, eucalyptus for toilet paper and palm fields to produce cheap vegetable oil for industrial food production. We are simply struggling to shift our production methods that were built on oil-based extractive industries. Shift in our paradigm entails an end to extactivist industrial practices.
Transition of industry requires transition of workforce to generate sustainable jobs. Biofuel, hydroponics, permaculture, remediation, plant-based chemical and food production seem likely to be cornerstones of transition economies. Minimalistic lifestyle and polar opposite of capitalist economic growth dictum would help our resources to recover as we have witnessed in air pollution and carbon emission levels during pandemic lockdown.
Energy
Production and distribution of energy is always been a primary concern for the industry. Although oil-based industry must be totally abandoned, solar energy does still look as the most cleanest renewable in prospect for coming years. Solar panels and wind turbines still comprimise great deal of steel and copper material. That requires coal and oil industries to manufacture those heavy metals. But since these materials will be used for many years, unlike wasting a commercial product after a few use, we have to tolerate given damage during transition times.
Some solutions were once discarded due to scalability problems were at high cost in past. But common use helps reducing installation costs as long as it’s been widely accepted by population. In Bangladesh, many villages having long been deprived of an electric system in their area, now have access to electricity and lightning via solar energy systems in which peer to peer scheme used by solar grid technologies. Each home is connected to each other and if any of them exceeds their daily quota, they can buy, borrow, take from another peer and circulate throughout the whole community. After the Fukushima disaster in 2013, German government decided an utter abolishment of nuclear energy. Year by year they are planning to switch their energy resources into renewables. A UK based company “Highview Power” is producing energy, based on simple theory of matter conversion by freezing air into liquid and heating back into steam to circulate and create an excessive energy output to store in massive batteries. By nature of renewable energies, they are intermittent and needs to be stored until the need of energy use arises. EU CEP (Clean Energy Package) manager Valeska Gottke, strongly advices including energy storage into energy transmission systems as a vital 4th pillar, besides generation, transmission and distribution. An energy storage system “Power Ledger” using blockchain technology for tracking and management of generated green energy among EU countries of Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark and Luxemburg. It is actually an energy storage system, yet very similar to the distribution scheme in Bangladesh with difference on its executing scale. What we must be adopting is a supra-design policy that prioritizes sustainability from minor to major scale. When imperialism built extractive principles to take advantage of resources, consequences are yielded to later.
Economic and environmental crisis proves us globalization is failed with its top down scheme. Covid-19 viral outbreak hit supply chains, some sectors went obsolete and many employees were left unemployed. Eventually, our non-circular financial model creates a cycle of entropy in this context. It is only possible to create a sustainable circle while preserving ecosystems otherwise humankind will be facing upcoming crises in logarithmically severe trends. Therefore, designing the entrenched patterns in our foundations might offer an alternative during the pandemic slowdown. In 2020, coal consumption rate is dropped by %20 and share of renewables in the electric grid shifted by %7 despite the problems in supply chain. Only within a year, we managed to cut carbon emissions by %7 according to UN Climate Change commission.
This ratio is actually key to realize 2030 Climate Target Plan to achieve carbon neutrality that needs to be applied each year.
Designs for Transitionary Societies
How can designers become newly aware of the fact that design careers oten result in the use of vast amounts of materials that contribute to ecosystem destruction and pose risks to fellow humans? That “designers do a lot of material destroying on their way to being creative” (Tonkinwise 2013a, 5, Escobar, 2018). Besides changes in mind-set, one might thus expect the creation of skills sets appropriate to the transition design task. Transition design is thus conceived as a new area of design methodology, practice and research (...) (Escobar, 2018). From this perspective, in this last part transitionary design practices will be presented.
Today, fashion industry is one of the biggest polluters and CO2 emitter in the world. Fast fashion and cheap prices contributes to inequality gap while widespread industrial practices are harmful. However some research projects helping to pave the transitionary path from harmful to sustainable way by reviving ancient dying practices. Project H.E.R.B.S. in Netherlands, researcher Nienke Hoogvliet having produced from plants, dying textiles with natural colors. In the same vein, Biolab research group growing pigments from microalgae in industrial wastewater. While lots of wastewater available, the method of growing algae in this byproduct offers maximized efficiency for both threating the waste and making pigment out of it. The oxygen surrounding our globe is mostly relied on blue-green algae in oceans, microbiota colonies new ways of designing our production models from scratch. Due to their evolutionary history, fungi, algae and plant kingdom (hetotrophs, autotrophs and protists) takes the most important place in the biodiverstiy. Fossils have been found from 50 million years ago that show root associations between pines and fungi; pines have evolved with fungi. Where no organic soil is available, fungi mobilized nutrients from rocks and sand, making it possible for pines to grow (Tsing, 2015, 179) Therefore these masterfully skilled organisms can also decompose harmful substances like plastic pollution; if they are able to populate among them.
Particularly mycelium (fungi) offers great deal of sustainable material to replace leather, package and meat industries. Mycelium is simply the underground network of mushrooms on the surface. They grow a widespread stems of communication system throughout the whole ground and exert enzymes to decompose and consume what is available for food. Mushrooms on the surface is the fruity body of mycelium and has been used as meat replacement for years due to their protein-rich nutritious qualities. Reducing CO2 levels radically is possible to cut meat consumption altogether.
Tons of scientific resources supporting plant-based dietary habits as a key for healthy and long life span. Considering mushroom as staple for daily protein intake not only saves animal’s life but also ends these animals’ suffering and CO2 emission as well. In particular case of eliminating plastic waste and replacing plastic, innovative companies such as Ecovative, Akua, Biohm etc. using, mycelium, seaweed and algae to offer hopeful perspective due to their network-based structure and million years old surviving principles to get inspired by. Renowned Dutch designers Eric Klarenbeek and Maartje Dros work with algae, seaweed and mycelium. They have developed a new material called weed-ware, offering a degradable alternative to plastic. Production scheme is closed loop and suitable for 3D printing. Where plastic material is needed such as disposable medical products, packacing and even furniture weed-ware can be a sustainable solution. Klarenbeek is a pioneer in his field, has been designing mycelium based furnitures for years.
Today’s electronic devices and their disposal is a big concern. Post war period accumulated enormous wealth in warehouse production. We are just recently waking up from consumerism nightmare by an ecological crisis. Design duo Studio Plastique based in Antwerp, are investigating complex relationship of supply chain and resources. Their particular project Common Sands featuring an industrial scale upcycling derived from kitchen appliances to glassware. The idea behind extracting silica from discarded appliances and turning them into glassware is encouraging circular use of materials. Especially when the solar energy panels concerned, silicon production is needed on great scale. However extractive methods aren’t supposed to be the only way. If recyling silica material from old appliances just like Studio Plastique does, and utilizing them in solar panel production pipeline can be achieved, it offers a great potential to manufacture solar panels in a sustainable fashion, without global supply chain and extractive methods in the first place. Moreover, 27 years old Carvey Maigue from Philippines invented a UV foton absorbing material called AuREUS made of rotten vegetable and fruit scraps. In 2020 this entry won James Dyson prize. Rather than using typical glass windows, replacing this material would turn our buildings into solar farms, he says. His future plans are involving using his invention for solar powered transport system and integration on our clothes.
To sum up, a set of principles to organize our life must be practiced. Plant-based dietary habits, zero waste and upcycling movements are most common transitionary practices to sustainable life-style for now. Human population has been used to live in comfort but we have to create a snowball effect to change our paradigm. The accumulation of knowledge and experience brought humankind from caves to houses. Every small step is an improvement on larger scale.
[1] Designer Richard Hutten – Dezeen summit 2019 https://youtu.be/iuBX3k_bqQ0
[2] Françoise Vergès: Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender https://youtu.be/0cw0s0AyQiI; Vergès, Françoise - A Decolonial Feminism, 2021, vii
[3] Jason W. Moore : Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and the Crisis of the 21st Century https://youtu.be/x2cp6uqDVQU
[4]Stengers, Isabelle: Autonomy and Intrusion of Gaia, South Atlantic Quarterly, 389
[5] The Exploitation of Jungle https://www.dw.com/en/the-exploitation-of-jungle/av-49730430
[6] https://www.unep.org/interactive/emissions-gap-report/2020/
[7] https://www.dezeen.com/2018/09/25/state-of-the-worlds-fungi-report-mushrooms-eat-plastic-kew-gardens/
[8]https://www.dezeen.com/2020/11/27/aureus-carvey-ehren-maigue-james-dyson-awards-sustainability/?li_source=LI&li_medium=rhs_block_3
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Abstract
Colonization and Consequences
Production and Design
Energy
Designs for Transitionary Societies
Anthropocene & Sustainable Design
As time goes by, supply started designing the demand and people were offered variety of manufactured goods in free market. Overconsumption is encouraged for financial growth and ever since the great depression, land fields were boosted with fertilizers. Soil has been spoiled with nitrogen to make it grow more surplus and intoxicated by pesticides on the other hand. Whereas until a few decades, sustainability was never been a concern. Household items are shaped with the idea of making life easier and spending less time on arduous tasks. But design is beyond shaping the objects in our tangible world. Instead of keeping on filling the world with stuff, what design strategies will allow humans to lead more meaningful and environmentally responsible lives (Thackara 2004, Escobar 2018)? Without having a bond of kinship and respect to other living beings, could it be possible to live in harmony within the ecosystems? Human population dominated the face of the earth with themselves and their domesticated livestock for food. %5 of CO2 emissions are coming from livestock manure. This amount is more than air, rail and ship transportation altogether. Designing a way of living and a paradigm for a world where multiple worlds and ecosystems can fit in. In “Designs for Pluriverse”, Arturo Escobar suggests de-growth and a set of principles for designing and living in a sustainable ecosystem. His approach prioritizes gender equality, feminist ideals and spiritual foundation as an ontological approach. In Buddhism attachment of the self and fixation on an objectivist notion (…) real causes of suffering. A correlate notion, nothing exists by itself that everything interexists (Escobar, 2018, 84). Alternatively, one may say that the self is a nexus “within a continuously unfolding field of relations” (Ingold,2011 xii, Escobar 2018) Buddhist principles in practice are avoiding any kind of harm, violence and meat consumption, fits for a spiritual / ontological foundation. We find a sustained answer to this question in the framework for “the work that reconnects” developed by Joanna Macy and colleagues from the perspective of systems thinking, ecology, feminism and Buddhism (Macy and Bown 1998, Macy 2007; Macy and Johnstone 2012, Escobar 2018, 127) Macy’s goal is to provide an intellectual and practical path for moving from self-destructive “industrial growth society” to “life-sustaining” one. This epochal shift, a Great Turning, demands a profound change in our perception of reality, including surrendering our belief in a separate self and adopting an ecological self: abandoning anthropocentrism in favor of life centered-paradigm; acknowledging the dependent coursing of all things, including the knower and the known, body and mind; fostering structural changes at the level of economic systems and technology; and cultivating shifts in consciousness through various means, such as non-dualist spiritualities. Only then can one hope to be “in league with the beings of the future” (2007,191), a concept that speaks to the concerns of sustainability (Escobar, 2018, 127).
Esin Güler