Wood - The Gift That Can't Keep on Giving  

IPS has a report from Mali on the overuse of wood as an energy source. I wonder if countries like this will ever manage to transition to sustainable local energy sources (in this case, solar thermal power and electric stovetops) ? The odds don't seem good.

Year by year, the figures have increased relentlessly. While some 600,000 tonnes of wood were transported to the Malian capital of Bamako in 1994, according to official figures, 750,000 tonnes were sent in 1997. This year, the city is projected to consume 900,000 tonnes -- and the country as a whole, seven million tonnes.

"If nothing is done to reverse this trend, the difference between supply and demand for wood will be negative by 2010," predicts the '2006 Report on the State of the Environment', issued by government.

But, reducing wood consumption in this West African country is something of a Herculean task, given the key role it plays in helping Mali meet energy requirements.

According to Niarga Keita, national coordinator of the Environmental Programme to Support the Fight Against Desertification (Programme environnemental d'appui à la lutte contre la désertification), 80 to 90 percent of Malians depend on natural resources for their daily needs. "In fact, the entire economy of the country relies on these natural resources," says Kéita.

Notes Awa Sow Cissé, executive director of the NGOs Co-operation and Support Council (Conseil de concertation et d'appui aux ONG): "To do her cooking, the Malian woman burns large quantities of wood often chopped by wood cutters who have only the sale of this wood to feed their families." The council groups 172 non-governmental organisations, all involved in the fight against desertification in Mali.

Then there are entrenched beliefs about the availability of wood.

"Until now, popular belief has had it that forest resources are a gift from God on which you can draw as much as you want, and that God will provide for their replenishment," says sociologist Hamidou Coulibaly. As a result, people use wood in an "excessive and lawless way".

I see "The Bush Beat" has returned to the Village Voice, noting that Paul Wolfowitz is as popular at the World Bank as his troops are in Iraq.

The Oil Drum (UK) has a look at Peak Oil and Senegal.

For whom is peak oil the most critical, the developed world of America, Europe and similar or the developing world of sub-Saharan Africa? Clearly the West’s oil consumption, both absolute and per capita is far greater than Africa’s but how will peak oil affect oil availability in the two areas and what will the impact be?

I recently spent a week in Senegal, the most westerly African country. Here I’ll share some observations from Senegal with comparisons made to the UK.

Senegal is a poor country with all per capita metrics of conventional wealth far lower than western standards however the many Senegalese I met seemed, outwardly at least to be very happy people. There are certainly more smiles on the street in Dakar than in London. This does raise the question of whether conventional economic metrics tell the whole story, clearly they don’t but in absence of any standard “wellbeing” or “happiness” index they are all we have.

Oil consumption is extremely low at 0.9 barrels per capita per year. This is some 10 times less than the UK. Not only is the absolute usage significantly less but also the distribution of usage is different. Oil is almost exclusively used for transport in the UK, there being little alternative, most other potential uses of oil have been substituted.

In Senegal 37% of the nation's oil supply is used in electricity generation which in turn represents approximately 76% of the nations electricity supply. As noted above, all of Senegal's oil is imported. This is a critical vulnerability, a vulnerability that was realised last year with price rises and frequent blackouts. ...

The sorry truth of the situation is that poor countries with little or no fossil fuel resources of their own often rely on imported oil for electricity generation. If peak oil results in substantial and prolonged price hikes, demand destruction from these poor countries is the obvious result. However this won’t only result in the reduced transportation services we typically associate with oil shortages but more critically will result in reduced electricity availability effecting communications, refrigeration, lighting etc. services that are perhaps more important than internal combustion engine transportation, especially in a country with only 0.02 cars per capita anyway.

Here's a TED Talk from Cameron Sinclair open source house design.

Accepting his 2006 TED Prize, Cameron Sinclair demonstrates how passionate designers and architects can respond to world housing crises. The motto of his group, Architecture for Humanity, is "Design like you give a damn." Using a litany of striking examples, he shows how AFH has helped find creative solutions to humanitarian crises all over the globe. Sinclair then outlines his TED Prize wish: to create a global open-source network that will let architects and communities share and build designs to house the world.

Jeff Vail also has an open source architecture project going, called the "MeFab Open Architecture Project". On a related note, see Jeff's post "The Design Imperative".

In response to my recent post, The Design Imperative, Bob Rohatensky gave me some inspiration with an introduction to his open-source, renewable energy project www.shpegs.org. I’ve been toying for years now with various designs for a sustainable house. I have lofty goals—I want it to exemplify elegant simplicity, I want it to be based on vernacular technology & materials, I want it to be adaptable to many sites, many different sizes, needs, etc., I want it to be energy autonomous and incorporate low embodied-energy materials, and I want it be such a sexy design that all of that goes completely unnoticed.

What better way to pursue these goals than through the open-source design process?

For the time being at least, I’m calling this “MeFab,” to signify its use of vernacular technology and materials, and to place it in juxtaposition with the latest trend toward high-design, pre-fab housing (which tends to exemplify the anti-vernacular, proprietary, “high-tech to the rescue” approach to architecture).

My starting point design is for an 800 square foot, one bedroom, one bath residence that can seamlessly, and in phases, expand to a three bedroom + office, two bath residence of 1600 square feet. My conception is for a Southern Arizona environment such as Tucson, but I think that with minor adaptation this design will be broadly applicable to locations with temperate climate and moderate to high solar exposure. ...

If this kind of thing interest you to any degree, please participate! Feel free to modify these graphics, or produce your own, and I’ll post them here for discussion. Or take them and do what you want with them anywhere else...

NOTE: This is by no means the first “open architecture project” (see, e.g. the Open Architecture Network), but it is the only one to my knowledge that is not carried away with non-vernacular, high-technology, happy-motoring-utopia architecture.

Continuing the design theme, WorldChanging has a post from Allan Chochinov of Core77 called 1000 Words: A Manifesto for Sustainability in Design.

I don't like the word manifesto. It reeks of dogma and rules—two things I instinctively reject. I do love the way it puts things on the line, but I don't like lines, or groups. So a manifesto probably isn't for me. The other thing about manifestos is that they appear (or are written so as to appear) self-evident. This kind of a priori writing is easy, since you simply lay out what seems obviously—even tautologically—true.

Of course, this is the danger of manifestos, but also what makes them fun to read. And fun to write. So I'll write this manifesto. I just might not sign it.

Anyway, here they are. Exactly 1000 words:

Hippocratic Before Socratic

"First do no harm" is a good starting point for everyone, but it's an especially good starting point for designers. For a group of people who pride themselves on "problem solving" and improving people's lives, we sure have done our fair share of the converse. We have to remember that industrial design equals mass production, and that every move, every decision, every curve we specify is multiplied—sometimes by the thousands and often by the millions. And that every one of those everys has a price. We think that we're in the artifact business, but we're not; we're in the consequence business.

Stop Making Crap

And that means that we have to stop making crap. It's really as simple as that. We are suffocating, drowning, and poisoning ourselves with the stuff we produce, abrading, out-gassing, and seeping into our air, our water, our land, our food— and basically those are the only things we have to look after before there's no we in that sentence. It gets into our bodies, of course, and it certainly gets into our minds. And designers are feeding and feeding this cycle, helping to turn everyone and everything into either a consumer or a consumable. And when you think about it, this is kind of grotesque. "Consumer" isn't a dirty word exactly, but it probably oughta be.

Systems Before Artifacts

Before we design anything new, we should examine how we can use what already exists to better ends. We need to think systems before artifacts, services before products, adopting Thackara's use/not own principles at every step. And when new products are needed, they'll be obvious and appropriate, and then can we conscientiously pump up fossil fuels and start polymerizing them. Product design should be part of a set of tools we have for solving problems and celebrating life. It is a means, not an end.

Teach Sustainability Early

Design education is at a crossroads, with many schools understanding the potentials, opportunities, and obligations of design, while others continue to teach students how to churn out pretty pieces of garbage. Institutions that stress sustainability, social responsibility, cultural adaptation, ethnography, and systems thinking are leading the way. But soon they will come to define what industrial design means. (A relief to those constantly trying to define the discipline today!) This doesn't mean no aesthetics. It just means a keener eye on costs and benefits.

Screws Better Than Glues

This is lifted directly from the Owner's Manifesto, which addresses how the people who own things and the people who make them are in a kind of partnership. But it's a partnership that's broken down, since almost all of the products we produce cannot be opened or repaired, are designed as subassemblies to be discarded upon failure or obsolescence, and conceal their workings in a kind of solid-state prison. This results in a population less and less confident in their abilities to use their hands for anything other than pushing buttons and mice, of course. But it also results in people fundamentally not understanding the workings of their built artifacts and environments, and, more importantly, not understanding the role and impact that those built artifacts and environments have on the world. In the same way that we can't expect people to understand the benefits of a water filter when they can't see the gunk inside it, we can't expect people to sympathize with greener products if they can't appreciate the consequences of any products at all.

Design for Impermanence

In his Masters Thesis, "The Paradox of Weakness: Embracing Vulnerability in Product Design," my student Robert Blinn argues that we are the only species who designs for permanence—for longevity—rather than for an ecosystem in which everything is recycled into everything else. Designers are complicit in this over-engineering of everything we produce (we are terrified of, and often legally risk-averse to, failure), but it is patently obvious that our ways and means are completely antithetical to how planet earth manufactures, tools, and recycles things. We choose inorganic materials precisely because biological organisms cannot consume them, while the natural world uses the same building blocks over and over again. It is indeed Cradle-to-Cradle or cradle-to-grave, I'm afraid.

Balance Before Talents

The proportion of a solution needs to balance with its problem: we don't need a battery-powered pooper scooper to pick up dog poop, and we don't need a car that gets 17 MPG to, well, we don't need that car, period. We have to start balancing our ability to be clever with our ability to be smart. They're two different things.

Metrics Before Magic

Metrics do not get in the way of being creative. Almost everything is quantifiable, and just the exercise of trying to frame up ecological and labor impacts can be surprisingly instructive. So on your next project, if you've determined that it may be impossible to quantify the consequences of a material or process or assembly in a design you're considering, maybe it's not such a good material or process or assembly to begin with. There are more and more people out there in the business of helping you to find these things out, by the way; you just have to call them.

Climates Before Primates

This is the a priori, self-evident truth. If we have any hope of staying here, we need to look after our home. And our anthropocentric worldview is literally killing us. "Design serves people"? Well, I think we've got bigger problems right now.

Context Before Absolutely Everything

Understanding that all design happens within a context is the first (and arguably the only) stop to make on your way to becoming a good designer. You can be a bad designer after that, of course, but you don't stand a chance of being a good one if you don't first consider context. It's everything: In graphics, communication, interaction, architecture, product, service, you name it—if it doesn't take context into account, it's crap. And you already promised not to make any more of that.