Material Innovations

Based on innumerable sources, it is clear that the world, as we know it, is doomed.  Accounts differ as to the timeline, some suggest the end due to solar activity or pole-shift as early as 2012, others are generous and suggest things will continue until the third or fourth decade of this century ending as a result of increased global temperature related conditions.

As far back as I can recall, I’ve always felt confident that the world, as we know it, would end in my lifetime.  In decades past this end-of-days was linked to direct human activity, mainly global-nuclear warfare.  As the cold war atrophied, that end-of-the-world scenario remained present, but the means have changed from direct, to indirect human activity – mainly in the form of human-enhanced climate change.

Whether or not the world as we know it will end in a few decades due to cataclysmic events, Western life-style practices, or even ten-thousand years of global human agricultural cultivation, one thing that is striking is the level of Western guilt that has crept into the dialog.  Certainly I am guilty of this guilt, both in terms of feeling it as well as promoting it. Yet, I am also painfully aware that I am doing little about it.  I feel like a member of a chapel choir who belts the praises of the Lord at every Sunday service, but outside of church, I live like a heathen, boozing and carousing at every turn.

But what is this guilt-ridden Western designer to do?  According to Singanapalli Balaram, I am not country enough to make a positive contribution to the simple life where design is REALLY needed.  According to Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Discipline, I am not scientific enough to contribute to curbing the climate crisis.  And, what good reason is there for me to sacrifice my comforts while the rest of the West continues to trample the commons?  Brand suggests: “be as life-changing as any earthworm in the big yard.”  Great.  Show me an earthworm with a mortgage.

One thing is true:  The majority of my design-thinking these days has gone quietly to the topic of Cataclismic Survival Implements.  Maybe this will be a fruitful endeavor.