Which modern enviro concepts are throwbacks to the past?

Imagine a city where the main boulevard has been converted to a greenway, replete with thousands of trees, birdsong, and even a creek. Battery-powered buses and free bicycles stationed at each corner replace cars, which are banned. For intercity travel, high-speed magnetic trains transport passengers as fast as a plane—in fact, the trains are made by Boeing, which abandoned the polluting business of air travel long ago. The city’s food waste, sewage, and garbage are composted for fertilizer. All the produce is organically grown. The livestock are free-range. Scientists provide third-party review of foods, keeping companies honest. And everything from clothes to containers is biodegradable in keeping with the overarching principle of sustainability. At night in the city, you can look up and see the stars for the first time in more than a century.

Sound like a modern green fantasy, designed by a team of hotshot urban planners and enviro activists? In fact, the city dates from 1975. It is a vision of San Francisco from the landmark novel Ecotopia, which embodied the ideas of the environmental movement at the time—ideas, of course, that are very similar to the up-and-coming designs of today.

With all the talk about a new green revolution, new energy paradigms, and climate change, it’s easy to overlook how many of the pillars of modern environmentalism are not, in fact, new. A whole host of these dynamic, forward-looking ideas were born in the 60s and 70s.

Biologists Howard and Eugene Odum developed the modern image of the Earth as an intricate tracery of biological systems in the 1960s. They were also the first to point out that crops are in some sense made of oil, in that it takes oil to fertilize them, harvest them, and transport them. In the 60s and early 70s, Robert MacArthur helped transform the natural history-based ecology of the past into the systemic, ahistorical science of today. In 1977, solar power made its first serious move towards the mainstream as President Jimmy Carter famously installed panels on the White House roof and provided the first solar incentives to individuals. And iconoclasts like Buckminster Fuller were designing for sustainability long before that.

What are the best ideas—be they technologies, concepts, legal policies, or states of mind—that have been revived from the first wave environmental movement? Which forgotten ideas should be revisited? And are there any ideas you’re glad have been left to the past?

What ideas in the interim have really changed the game?

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Climate Change Was Not Even on the Radar

Denis Hayes was the founding head of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory during the Carter administration and the national coordinator of the first Earth Day in 1975. Having served on dozens of boards, he is now the president and CEO of The Bullitt Foundation.

This question seems best suited to a list!

The best technologies revived from the 1960s and 1970s:

• Solar photovoltaic cells to produce safe, clean distributed power.
• Integrated circuits allowing us to make everything “smart.”
• Plug-in serial hybrid autos. (John Reuyl was hand-building them by 1978, but he had only lead-acid batteries to use. Porsche had actually tried them six decades earlier.)
• Integrated pest management.
• Super-efficient passive solar buildings.

The best concepts and laws:

• The air, waters, and ground are not public dumps into which anyone can pour unlimited toxic materials.
• Citizens have the right to enforce environmental laws when governments fail to act.
• The Endangered Species Act (and the Marine Mammal Protection Act)—protecting life whether or not it directly serves a human purpose. Perhaps the most selfless laws ever passed.
• The National Environmental Policy Act, requiring that we assess the environmental impacts of major projects before proceeding.

The best states of mind:

• The Earth is finite. Nothing can grow forever on a globe.
• In our democracy, an informed, aroused citizenry can still overcome huge odds to end a war, advance human rights, and protect the biosphere. “Who says you can’t save the world?”
• Environmental values lead to sustainable jobs. This was understood early on—the largest source of financial support for the first Earth Day was organized labor, and I helped found a group called “Environmentalists for Full Employment” back in 1971. The natural alliance was forgotten in the heat of the “jobs versus owls” debate and with the collapse of Detroit. However, today, under the banner of “green jobs,” it is reemerging as an important idea.

The ideas that should be revisited:

• The Earth has a finite long-term carrying capacity for Homo sapiens. That carrying capacity relates to affluence and technological choices. It could support 10 billion people for a long time if everyone lived like Chinese peasants, but not even Chinese peasants want to live that way. If humanity aspires to, say, a Swedish or Japanese standard of living, it already has at least twice as many humans as it can support. Zero population growth is inadequate; we need negative population growth to avoid calamity.
• Recycling is serious business in a resource-limited world. We are lagging behind Europe, and even Europe is not having much success with electronics recycling.
• Solar access laws that provide people who install solar collectors the right not to have their equipment shaded by later development.

The ideas best left to the past:

• Some things we thought were true have been shown to be simply wrong. For example, we thought the greatest threat to the ozone layer came from oxides of nitrogen whereas it turned out to be from CFCs.
• Some of the wilder greens had ideas that never proved very persuasive, e.g. carrying small cloths with you, and washing them daily, to use instead of toilet paper. I’m happy to leave that one in the past.
• Recycling started with people carting their paper, glass, and cans to centralized recycling centers. By 1990, it was clear that this made no sense and we began pushing for curbside recycling.

The ideas since the first wave that have really changed the game:

• Climate change was not an issue on anyone’s mind at the time of the first Earth Day. It wasn’t until 1979, when the National Academy of Sciences produced a report saying that that evidence warranted action, that it began filtering outside the atmospheric sciences community.
• In 1970, CFCs would have been on a lot of lists as a true triumph of industrial chemistry—nontoxic, nonflammable, nonexplosive compounds with myriad valuable uses. A few years later, we discovered that they were a threat to life on Earth and must be banned.
• With the success of Patagonia, Interface, Whole Foods, and many others, there is now a recognition that “environmentalists” don’t have to work for the Sierra Club. Environmentalism is a set of values, and environmentalists need to carry those values throughout industry and government if we are to succeed.

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Revive Faith in Our Ingenuity

Mary Nichols brought the first litigation under the Clean Air Act of 1970. Among many other appointments, she has served as the California Secretary of Resources and as the Assistant Administrator of Air and Radiation for the EPA. She is currently the chairman of the California Air Resource Board.

I graduated from law school in 1971 and began my career as an environmentalist at the same time the basic US environmental protection statutes (NEPA, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act) were coming into force. I think of myself as an urban environmentalist, in contrast with many in the movement who are agrarians at heart. I believe that we humans can think and invent our way out of most of the problems we have created, but it becomes harder as the scale and complexity of pollution requires social and economic cooperation at a scale previously unknown.

What worked and deserves to come back: performance-based regulations that are crafted with knowledge of what technology can do if we demand it. What did not work and should be consigned to the dust heap of history: a belief that if you don’t build it they won’t come. Litigation and political pressure to limit or reduce density of housing, transportation, sewage treatment, and other infrastructure cannot reduce the environmental impact of cities.

The progressive engagement of chemistry, biology, the social sciences, urban planning, architecture, moral philosophy, and religion in solving our environmental dilemmas have each been game changers in their time, but I am still waiting for the insights that can only come from music and art.

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Don’t Forget about Population

Described by the Washington Post as “one of the world’s most influential thinkers,” Lester Brown is the founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, where he also serves as president. His most recent book is Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

I wouldn’t necessarily call this a forgotten idea, but it has slipped off the radar a bit: population. In the early days of the environmental movement, a number of us spoke about the dangers of unchecked population growth. The planet is now trying to support 6.7 billion people. Humanity’s collective demands surpassed the Earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980. Today our demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield capacity by an estimated 25 percent. In addition, the world now has more than 1 billion
chronically hungry and malnourished people. We are setting ourselves up for
collapse unless we ratchet down our population.

A number of great ideas have changed the game since the environmental movement began. I’ll focus on renewable energy, which has gone through a huge revolution, especially in the last year. There isn’t enough space here to detail the number of huge projects currently underway for wind, solar, and geothermal power, but we are seeing a significant increase in renewable energy projects that will make it possible to considerably cut carbon emissions quickly. For instance, the enormous number of wind projects under development in Texas, on top of the 9,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity in operation and under construction, will bring Texas to more than 50,000 megawatts of wind-generating capacity (think 50 coal-fired power plants) when all these wind farms are completed. This will more than satisfy the needs of the state’s 24 million residents.

Nationwide, new wind-generating capacity in 2008 totaled 8,400 megawatts while new coal plants totaled only 1,400 megawatts. The annual growth in solar generating capacity will also soon overtake that of coal. The United States has led the world in each of the last four years in new wind-generating capacity, but China appears set to blow by the United States in 2009.

China, with its Wind Base program, is working on six wind farm mega-complexes with generating capacities that range from 10,000 to 30,000 megawatts, for a total of 105,000 megawatts. This is in addition to the hundreds of smaller wind farms built or planned. Wind is not the only option. In July 2009, a consortium of European corporations led by Munich Re, and including Deutsche Bank, Siemens, and ABB, in addtion to an Algerian firm, announced a proposal to tap the massive solar thermal generating capacity in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Solar thermal power plants in North Africa could economically supply half of Europe’s electricity. The Algerians have enough harnessable solar energy in their desert to power the world economy. The soaring investment in wind, solar, and geothermal energy is being driven by the exciting realization that these renewables can last as long as the Earth itself.

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Hard Times—Whenever They Are—Breed Environmental Responsibility

Henry Pollack has been a professor of geophysics at the University of Michigan for more than 40 years, travels regularly to Antarctica, and has conducted scientific research on all seven continents. The author of the forthcoming A World Without Ice, he now serves as a science adviser to Al Gore’s Climate Project.

Some of the core concepts of the environmental first wave, in the 60s and 70s, were actually practiced by earlier generations in times of hardship, and it might take more hardship, rather than simply ideology, for them to truly be implemented.

A short time ago I came across a brief survey about attitudes toward recycling in different age groups. The question posed was something like this: Which age group shows the greatest willingness to recycle household paper, plastic, glass, and cans? There were only three choices: under 35, 35–70, and over 70. My first reaction was to choose the youngest group, feeling that they were the generation that grew up during the rise of the modern environmental movement. They were the generation that participated in Earth Days, that were urged to turn down the thermostat and turn off the lights, that heard the mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle.” Indeed, the survey results showed that this group displayed a high level of willingness, but to my surprise they did not lead the survey. The most willing age group was the over-70s.

In retrospect, it should not have been a surprise. These senior citizens were the folks that grew up during World War II and were asked to collect and recycle paper, tin and aluminum foil, rubber bands and scrap metal as part of the war effort. They felt good about contributing to conservation of materials that were necessary to supply our troops with the equipment they needed to defend the nation. In last place in this survey were the baby boomers, those in the gap between the old-timers and the young generation. The boomers grew up in a time of apparently unbounded affluence, a time when the landfill became the destination for unwanted household items, many used for only a short time. It was a time of “planned obsolescence.”

Recycling is an old idea, practiced by today’s seniors when they were young and by today’s youth and young adults. It was an idea temporarily forgotten in the boomer era. World War II also made today’s seniors early practitioners of what has become the “locavore” movement. With the planting of ‘victory gardens’ on residential land, many citizens and neighborhoods grew vegetables that augmented the national food supply with the most local food production possible.

The parallels between the conservation efforts during World War II and the conservation efforts of today are clear. During World War II the very existence of the nation was under military attack. Today the habitat of all of humanity is under environmental attack. Our senior citizens showed that when people are properly motivated to save something, they can rise to the occasion. Let us hope that today’s generation is motivated to respond with similar determination.

What particularly caught my interest was the idea of calling civilization, and even the social networks between people, facilitated by communication technology (anywhere from verbal and gestural communication, to the internet), can be observed as a single organism, using the metaphor of the cells in our body making up the moving, talking, thinking construct that we call ourselves. Dan Dennet, in his

TED talk on consciousness (I have yet to read his book on his interpretation of consciousness), made a similar point: all of the neurons interacting with each other as interconnected, yet individual organisms, and unaware of their collective product, generate the perception of consciousness, though we consider the neurons themselves unconscious. Within the cell as well, the systems can be broken down into smaller and smaller parts.

Taking the example of the brain, the individual nodes making up the whole are not fully 'aware' of their collective society, and that that society seems to imagine itself as conscious, we can apply it to human society in the same way, and we humans, mere cells in the system, cannot fully understand what the 'consciousness' of the complete system may be. As is well covered in these posts, the information transfer rate is accelerating, and increasingly more effective means of information and goods transfer are evolving, as a trend of culture and technology. It seems almost inevitable that in a not so distant future, every one of us will be linked intimately with every single other, through modes of technology not yet foreseen, but that would allow for instantaneous, effective, and adapting information flow in the collective network of the human species. Forms of life, made up of all the humans in existence today, perceive and exist in planes that we literally cannot imagine. As is often useful to do when discussing evolutionary systems such as this, the phenomenon can be described as having intention and desire: "What does technology want?" Obviously, evolution has no intentions or desires, but merely trends, that within certain fractal scales of time and space, are relatively constant.

Links:

http://www.celldeath.de/encyclo/index.html

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/03/civilizations_a.php

Hack your brain

Text by Johan Lehrer, graphics by Javier Zarracina

DO YOU EVER want to change the way you see the world? Wouldn't it be fun to hallucinate on your lunch break? Although we typically associate such phenomena with powerful drugs like LSD or mescaline, it's easy to fling open the doors of perception without them: All it takes is a basic understanding of how the mind works.

The first thing to know is that the mind isn't a mirror, or even a passive observer of reality. Much of what we think of as being out there actually comes from in here, and is a byproduct of how the brain processes sensation. In recent years scientists have come up with a number of simple tricks that expose the artifice of our senses, so that we end up perceiving what we know isn't real - tweaking the cortex to produce something uncannily like hallucinations. Perhaps we hear the voice of someone who is no longer alive, or feel as if our nose is suddenly 3 feet long.

5 Ways To Hack Your Brain Into Awesomeness

By Joe DB

Much of the brain is still mysterious to modern science, possibly because modern science itself is using brains to analyze it. There are probably secrets the brain simply doesn't want us to know.

But by no means should that stop us from tinkering around in there, using somewhat questionable and possibly dangerous techniques to make our brains do what we want.

We can't vouch for any of these, either their effectiveness or safety. All we can say is that they sound awesome, since apparently you can make your brain...

#5.

Think You Got a Good Night's Sleep (After Only Two Hours of Actual Sleep)

So you just picked up the night shift at your local McDonald's, you have class every morning at 8am and you have no idea how you're going to make it through the day without looking like a guy straight out of Dawn of the Dead, minus the blood... hopefully.

"SLEEEEEEEEEP... uh... I mean... BRAAAIIIIINNNSSS..."

What if we told you there was a way to sleep for little more than two hours a day, and still feel more refreshed than taking a 12-hour siesta on a bed made entirely out of baby kitten fur? No more sneaking naps at the fry station for you!

Holy Shit! How Do I Do It?

It's called the Uberman Sleep Schedule, and besides having a totally badass name, it's a way to get the maximum amount of essential sleep for your body without wasting hours of precious time you could be using to work or drink or farm for World of Warcraft gold. The schedule consists of taking six, 20-30 minute power naps, every four hours during the day. Of course, this new sleep pattern blows donkey-dick to get used to, but it's a price you have to pay to basically extend your waking life by several years.

The best way to start it off is to just jump right in. Get to sleep at 8pm, set your alarm for 8:30. Get up, play some Call of Duty, sleep again at 12, alarm at 12:30, and so on. After three or four days of this you will start to get high as fuck because of sleep deprivation, and might just want to kill yourself, but don't do it! That would be absolutely counter-productive.

By day 10 or so, your brain will say, "Fuck! FINE, we'll do it your way," and will adapt to your new superhuman sleep schedule.

How Does It Work?

When you sleep normally, your body gets only about an hour and a half of REM sleep, the kind of sleep that is thought to be the most important to keeping your brain sharp. While other stages of sleep help your body to heal and grow, the REM sleep is what makes you feel rested.

The first few days of adjusting are tough because your body isn't getting ANY of this REM sleep, and your brain hates you for it. After the third day, or so, your brain figures out that you mean business, and every time you lay down for one of these naps, dives directly into REM sleep in an attempt to compensate for the deprivation. Do some quick math and that's two full hours of REM sleep, while those who are sleeping normally are only getting an hour and a half.

Before you know it, while the rest of the world snores away, you'll be up and drawing dicks on their faces.

#4.

Hallucinate Like You Just Took LSD, Legally

Yes, that's right kids! Tell your dealer goodbye and worry no more about winding up naked on the roof of an office building after a bad trip. Now you can be stoned out of your mind by building a homemade deprivation chamber out of some regular, completely harmless household objects.

Holy Shit, How Can I Do It!

You are going to need three things: a ping-pong ball, a radio with headphones and a red light.

Step 1: Turn the radio to a station with just white noise (static), and put on your headphones.

Step 2: Cut the ping-pong ball in half and tape each half over your eyes.

Step 3: Turn the red light so it's facing your eyes.

Step 4: Sit there for at least a half an hour.

Step 5: Follow Ben Franklin and your new friend, Harold the unicorn, into the gumdrop forest, and live happily ever after.

How Does It Work?

It's called the Ganzfeld effect, and it works by blocking out most of the signals that go to your brain. It's the same kind of effect you get when looking into a soft light for a while and lose vision, except at a larger scale.

The sound of the white noise and the light from the outside of the ping pong ball are eventually ignored by your brain. With all those signals out of the picture, your brain has to create its own, and this is where the hallucinations come in. We can't guarantee they won't involve, say, the ghost of Lizzie Borden trying to hack off your scrotum with an ax, but that's the risk you take, dammit.

Now, if you want a little more control over your hallucinations...

#3.

Dream Whatever You Want to Dream

What if we told you there was a way to make all your fantasies come true? You could have that sports car you've always wanted and the daily threesome with Sarah Palin and Cannonball Run-era Burt Reynolds. Hell, we'll even throw in a few superpowers for your enjoyment.

Welcome to the wonderful world of lucid dreaming.

Holy Shit, How Can I Do It?

Most of you reading this have had a lucid dream before. Every once in a while you wind up in a dream but somehow recognize it as a dream, and you may have found yourself able to pretty much program the dream to your specifications. While there are plenty of tips and tricks to make this happen on purpose, we've narrowed it down to what seems like the most useful, so that you can be riding dinosaurs with Gary Coleman in your sleep in no time:

1. Keep a Dream Journal

As soon as you wake up from a dream, write down every little thing you can remember about it. Supposedly by writing it down, your brain recognizes certain patterns that only occur in a dream (since most dreams are immediately forgotten) and if they are on paper, you can recall them easily.

2. Think about exactly what you want to dream right before you fall asleep. Makes sense. For instance you've probably fallen asleep watching MythBusters before and immediately dreamed you were flying through the air, using a giant version of Jamie's mustache as a hang glider.

Just us?

3. The best time to have a lucid dream is either right before you regularly wake up, or right after. Studies have shown that more people have lucid dreams when they take a nap shortly after they first wake up in the morning.

So you can do all that, or if you are the lazy type, get yourself something like the NovaDreamer, a device that detects when you've entered REM sleep and then makes a noise that's supposed to be not quite enough to wake you up, but enough to raise your awareness to, "Hey, this is totally a dream I'm having!" levels.

How Does It Work?

Obviously the big difference between a dream and real life is that if the Hamburglar came bursting out of your refrigerator right now and started screaming at you in Vietnamese, your first thought would be "This is a strange and unusual event that is occurring right now, and I should question my perceptions." If the same thing happens in a dream, you just go with it.

In a dream state, your mind mostly loses the ability to criticize anything that's happening because dreaming just doesn't involve the critical part of your brain. You're all worried that you're at work in your underwear, and don't even blink at the fact that your boss is a dragon who speaks in the voice of your old middle school gym coach.

But if you change your mental state ever so slightly, that critical part of your brain can keep functioning even while in dreamland. If you can perfect the technique of dreaming while not all the way asleep, the next thing you know you're ordering up a Smurf orgy.

#2.

Learn More While You Sleep

So say you haven't followed that first step up there and choose to continue sleeping like other mere mortals. A very minor change in your schedule can still let you use your sleep patterns to your advantage, by making you smarter.

Holy Shit, How Can I Do It?

No, we're not talking about those scams where they have you put a tape recorder under your pillow and let it teach you Spanish while you're asleep. What scientists have found out is if you need to remember a bunch of information (say, for a big exam), do NOT study right up until time for the exam. Study at least 24 hours before, and sleep on it.

Note: "Sleep on it" is simply an expression. You can sleep in a bed.

They did a study at Harvard that proved this technique works. Participants were separated into three different groups after being shown images that they were told to memorize. One of the groups was tested on the memorization after 20 minutes, the other after 12 hours and the last after 24 hours. You would expect that the ones who were tested just 20 minutes later would do best, but that would, of course, make a really shitty story.

No, the participants who slept on it and had 24 hours for the information to fester in their brain did the best on the test, while those who only had 20 minutes did the worst.

How Does It Work?

Scientists say the ability your brain has to retain information works in three different ways: acquisition, consolidation and recall. While the first and last occur while you're awake, it's the middle-man that is important during sleep.

When you sleep, your brain is constantly processing information that you couldn't have processed with everything going on up there during the day. This works to strengthen your neurological bonds in the brain. Think of it like downloading something on a computer. When you go to download something while your porn is up, it takes longer, right? Close up any applications that are running and you have a smoother, quicker download. Yeah, kind of like that... maybe.

So does this technique work with the "sleep two hours a day" system we mentioned earlier? We're not sure anyone has tried it, but by our calculations such a person would immediately gain mental superpowers, possibly including telekinesis. Somebody in the comments try it and let us know.

#1.

Believe Something Happened (That Totally Didn't)

Stop for a moment and recall your fondest childhood memory. Or your worst. In either case, there's a really good chance that it's total bullshit.

Memory is a funny thing. Research has consistently found that our memories from when we were kids are either extremely inaccurate, or didn't happen at all. They are just elaborate constructions of a memory storage system that isn't very good at distinguishing real memories from fake ones.

Are you positive this didn't happen?

So what if we told you that there was a way to do this on purpose? To hack your brain into believing (and "seeing" vividly) a completely made-up event that never actually happened?

Holy Shit! How Do I Do It?

The trick is you need somebody else to do it for you (or to you). But it takes very little effort, and no Total Recall-style brain-hacking machines.

For instance, in a study in 1995 researchers sat down a group of people and mentioned four incidents from their childhood (gathered from family members) and asked subjects how well they remembered them. What they didn't mention was that one of the stories (a tale of them being lost in a specific shopping mall) was utter bullshit.

It didn't matter. Twenty percent came back with sudden memories of the event that, in reality, never happened. The sheer act of asking them if it did, caused them to manufacture the memory, filling in details on the fly.

Remember when Bruce Campbell was President?

Researchers knew they could up that 20 percent figure. In another test, an unsuspecting group of people who had visited Disneyland in the past were placed in a room with a cardboard cutout of Bugs Bunny and/or were shown fake ads for Disneyland featuring Bugs. Afterwards, 40 percent claimed they vividly remembered seeing a guy in a Bugs Bunny costume when they were at Disneyland. They didn't, of course (Bugs isn't a Disney character).

Another study took it a step further, and actually Photoshopped a picture of each subject riding in a hot air balloon. When asked if they recalled this non-event, 50 percent said they did. Other experiments successfully convinced people they had at one time nearly drowned, been hospitalized or been attacked by a wild animal.

How Does It Work?

Your brain kind of plays it fast and loose when it stores memories, and for good reason: Usually the details don't matter. You remember your best friend's phone number but don't remember exactly where and when he told you. You remember that you hate zucchini, but don't remember what day of the week you tried it. Your brain breaks up memories into a stew of general lessons learned and important stuff you'll need later.

The problem is that same process makes it very difficult to distinguish real memories from fake ones since the source of a memory is so often discarded in the stew. A fact you think you read in a newspaper might in reality have been read in a fictional novel, or heard from a friend, or dreamed, or implanted by somebody who's fucking with you.

So not only could somebody do this for you (though it would have to be set up so that you don't know where and when) but it seems like you could run a pretty successful business just implanting happy childhoods for people.

You know, like that time you found out you were adopted, and that your real parents were the Thundercats.