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 Dolce Aqua
Human life has always depended on the production of surpluses.
A beehive produces more honey than the bees assume they will need. If the spring comes late the bees may need to consume a little more honey. If the spring comes early the surplus will be greater. Human beings live off the surplus. If humans take more than the surplus there will be no honey for the bees and in a short time no honey for human beings either. The hive will die.
A fruit tree produces more fruit than is needed for the propagation of the species. If the soil is fertile the surplus will be great. Human beings live off the surplus fruit. If humans take more than the surplus soon there will be no fruit trees and no fruit. When we kill the natural world we also kill ourselves. We are one with the world.
A basic principle of life is to never eat the seed potatoes.
Sustainability has very little to do with the wise use of resources. If we do nothing more than that we are merely postponing the inevitable, and having no fun along the way. Wisdom would suggest that we should create resources, not use them up.
For too many people sustainability has come to mean nothing more than a contemporary search for immortality. The rather old fashioned fear of death. People want to sustain their own way of seeing the world, their own way of life, their own gene pool, and their own positions of power.
Fear however is not a good motivation for action. Fear of climate change is a poor reason to seek for a carbon-neutral New Zealand. Fear leads to irrational behaviour. Fear also makes individuals vulnerable to those seeking to make money out of climate change.
Greed and selfishness can also lead to irrational behaviour. If personal immortality means that others need to be sacrificed then that is nothing more than unfortunate. The idealism of Stockholm 1972 has moved on to the realisation that wars will be fought over water just as they are now fought over oil.
Greed, selfishness, pride and the lust for power can however also provide a good foundation for design excellence and award-winning architecture. Without our realising it much architecture celebrates death rather than life.
Architecture students study the great monuments left behind by civilisations which have died, and then they devote their lives to the production of new monuments, which they fail to see will, in their turn, become ruins. We need to change the way we build.
Those who do not learn from past mistakes are doomed to repeat them.
Environmentally responsible architecture never eats the seed potatoes.
In everything we do we should produce more than we consume.
No one would set up an economic venture for the purpose of producing a loss. We assume that the whole point of an economic venture is to make a profit.
Yet many people run lives where their environmental balance sheet ends up with a debit rather than a credit. Much architecture simply squanders a valuable inheritance to end up with nothing more than a building. A city like Auckland has taken one of the most beautiful sites in the world and reduced it to painful mediocrity. The experience and beauty of place has been lost. Auckland, as a city, has consumed its inheritance.
We do not begin life with a blank canvas. We begin with the inheritance of a beautiful "Rembrant". We too often learn nothing from it, and then we slap toxic paint all over it. We stand back and admire what we have done, without any comprehension of what we really have done. Urban designers scour the world looking for more "Rembrants" to destroy. Architects actually believe that their buildings enhance the beauty of nature. They are dreaming.
Not-for-profit or charitable organisations produce a surplus of quite a different kind from economic adventures. They may produce a surplus of good-will, compassion, love, or understanding.
In a carbon-neutral world the balance sheet needs to be inclusive rather than selective. We need to take into account all that we consume, but we are also entitled to give value to all that we produce.
When some visitors depart we feel that they have used our energy and resources to their own advantage. When other visitors depart we feel very glad that they called in because they have enriched our lives. They have shared their insights and stories. They have stimulated our minds and made us more than we were before they called.
Wise people surround themselves with positive people precisely because every interaction between positive people produces a surplus.
Positive people focus on what should be done rather than what should not be done. Negative people neutralise life. There is no merit in being carbon-neutral if the term means we are almost dead, having avoided the possibility of being completely dead.
At a global scale we need to be able to say of every person that it was good for them to be alive. We need to be able to say that their life has enriched the world.
We do not own the world. We are just visitors. We pass by and we are gone.
Environmentally responsible architecture produces more than it consumes.
The term "carbon-neutral" is unfortunate because it seems to suggest a negative approach to life, and a world in which no one is having any fun.
With some people you can say that they never did anything exceptionally bad in their lives, but on the other hand they never did anything exceptionally good either. They really never did anything. They managed to live lives of perfect mediocrity. They were neutral.
The Ministry for the Environment misses the whole point when it talks about reducing footprints. It is not the size of a person's footprint but the quality of the footprint which is important. A fruit tree enriches the whole of its footprint. Shrinking a bad footprint down until we are all miserable together is not the kind of dismal future which is going to save the universe. Being mean is not a virtue.
Sitting huddled over a solar powered bulb, sustained only by the thought that this sacrifice is saving the world, displays an incredible misunderstanding of both the world and life.
We need to remember that great monasteries like Le Thoronet were built by people who were seeking for perfection, not survival. The purity of the architecture reflects the purity of life of the inhabitants.
We need to realise that a big negative carbon footprint is an impediment to being fully alive. It is rather like those people who take too much luggage when they are travelling. If you want to take it all with you you may as well stay home. Too much luggage comes between a person and any new experience. Just like too much architecture.
Travelling light, and travelling with a lightness of being, makes it possible to smell the grass or listen to the land. We cannot experience other cultures when our own culture keeps getting in the way.
Having a big negative carbon footprint is a burden which weighs us down.
A beach house is about taking it all with you. A bach is about leaving it all behind.
Bureaucrats who assume that stopping people from being bad will somehow make them good neutralise lives rather than carbon emissions. A carbon-neutral world will only be possible when we throw out all the tedious regulations and leave them behind, recognising that they were a hindrance rather a help. We need idealism, not regulations.
Environmentally responsible architecture seeks for perfection though the positive art of being fully alive.
The key question we need to ask is not whether the built environment can produce a surplus, but rather how it can produce a surplus.
Muddled thinking has convinced everyone that architecture necessarily always consumes and destroys. Reducing the amount of destruction then becomes nothing more than making bad building either not quite as bad or not quite as big. In a carbon-neutral world destructive architecture would never be built.
Buildings can produce a surplus. For my "green architecture" courses I always begin by building a venue for the course. We then set out to generate a surplus of ideas, community interaction, and life. At the end of the course we recycle the venue and do the maths. The credit balance astonishes everyone. The people become empowered by the building process as well as the building. The surplus goes on compounding.
The carbon footprint of the building we erect is traditionally zero. It is built entirely out of the surplus produced by other buildings and is then completely recycled without degrading those materials and without leaving any mark on the land.
Shrinking the footprint of bad architecture never turns it into good architecture. To achieve carbon-neutrality we need a different way of seeing buildings.
The traditional New Zealand bach did not set out to "do without" the good things of life. It set out embrace them in the fullest possible way. The bach recognised that most buildings come between us and the wairua of the world. They deny us the experience of our wonderful natural environment.
Most architecture gets in the way of life. We need less insulation from life, not more.
The sailor who rows a dinghy out from a beach experiences the tides, the currents and the winds long before they reach their yacht. A marina is convenient and easy but it takes away from the experience of sailing. It is possible to spend more to end up with less. A marina can get in the way of the experience. It is the direct relationship between a person and the sea which produces great seamanship. The sea belongs to those who embrace it in its fullness.
Environmentally responsible architecture sets people free and helps to make them fully alive.
The idea of trading carbon credits is seriously flawed.
The original Kyoto Treaty set up a cap-and-trade mechanism. Many politicians and business leaders still favour the idea, for obvious reasons. It supports business-as-usual while seeming to make a commitment to a carbon-neutral New Zealand. The alternative market strategy of a carbon tax has no political support. When the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012 and a new regime is negotiated both negative mechanisms need to be replaced by a new positive way of thinking.
Making the assumption that everyone is entitled to destroy the world, provided that they only do a little bit of damage, is a nonsense. To assume that those who only do a modest amount of damage are entitled to sell their unused damage credits to the people who really want to get into doing serious damage is irresponsible and will do nothing to make New Zealand carbon-neutral.
Carbon credits are part of the problem, not part of the solution. Markets serve only to create more wealth for the already wealthy.
We would never create a market which assumed that the norm was for everyone to be sick, with the lucky people who happened to not be sick able to sell their sickness credits to some people who can then be really sick. This would be absurd. We presume a society in which everyone is healthy in mind and body. When someone suffers sickness or an accident we give them the support they need to bring them back to health.
The idea of a carbon market is nothing more tha a con trick. Other markets have created enormous concentrations of wealth but they were at least based upon manufacturing, growing or creating. The carbon market is based on nothing. Carbon comes free. Carbon credits are created out of nothing. It gets worse. The carbon market will over time make a major contribution to climate change, as the wealth created is used for luxury consumer spending
Carbon trading will eventually be seen as the greatest con of all time.
Global warming is a symptom, not a problem.
Treating symptoms does not cure problems. Setting out to reduce carbon emissions is not the same as achieving harmony and balance in the natural mechanisms of the universe. Carbon is but one element of a complex interactive system.
In a political or strategic sense it can be important to take one step at a time, lest the objective seems so unattainable that the vision paralyses action. However it is important to remember that there is another step to be taken.
The built-environment is the major cause of global warming. The built-environment is the most significant contributor to New Zealand's negative carbon footprint.
"Going green" without making fundamental changes to the way we build is nothing more than an excuse for avoiding the real issues.
When the "green pages" of a daily newspaper suggest eight ways of keeping warm, but fail to mention going out to sit in the sun, the reader must presume that the eight ways are all concerned with selling product, while sitting in the sun does nothing to add to the GDP. Awards are given to buildings which sell product rather than to buildings which transcend the need for product.
Environmentally responsible architecture is healthy architecture which helps to heal the life of the planet.
Autonomy is not the same as Sustainability.
We know a great deal about designing self-sufficient buildings. These are buildings which collect their own water and energy. They may even process their own waste. It seems at first that they are carbon-neutral, but when the whole life cycle of the building is taken into account they become consumers, rather than producers.
The energy and resources needed to erect and dispose of autonomous buildings can almost always never be recovered over the life span of the building.
Buildings which are held up as exemplars of sustainability, such as the Landcare Building in Auckland, are not sustainable. They are merely autonomous.
Autonomous buildings are good, and what they set out to achieve is worthy, but it is important not to hold them up as the architecture of a carbon-neutral New Zealand.
A sustainable building produces a surplus over the whole life cycle of the building.
Environmentally responsible architecture is sustainable, not just autonomous.
Embodied carbon and embodied energy must be sustained.
Buildings embody much more than the skill of the designer, the love of the builder, and the expertise of the craftsmen. They embody the wisdom of a culture and an understanding of place and tradition. They embody the energy which was used in the transportation and fabrication of materials. They are also a carbon sink.
When a building is demolished all this is lost and it can never be recovered.
Embodied energy is now part of mainstream thinking, but the term does not yet extend to human energy, and still does not take account of the carbon produced by the erection of the building.
Buildings are a much more important carbon sink than forests. It is fashionable to plant forests to offset the carbon cost of flying around the world to conferences on global warming. We might do better to develop long-life built environments.
In a carbon-neutral New Zealand buildings will not normally be demolished. This concept changes everything because it means we need to get the design of our built-environment right the first time round.
Every time a Council digs up a road they double their apparent carbon footprint. The embodied carbon of the original road is lost and this needs to be added to the new carbon footprint.
Environmentally responsible architecture gets it right the first time round.
Zero waste architecture is a critical component of a carbon-neutral future.
In nature there is no waste. When a tree falls in a forest it nurtures new life. The detritus of one generation of trees becomes the nutrient of the next generation.
Waste is the result of process failure and dysfunctionality. When we see black soot coming from the exhaust of a car we assume some fine tuning is necessary. The jumbo bin outside a building site indicates that the building process is a failure. The traditional act of building converts resources into junk. It destroys the life of the planet.
Buildings provide around 40% of the waste stream going to landfills.
In a zero-waste building even the shavings off the floor are saved. They are valuable for compost or perhaps will provide a BBQ for the builders. Of course to be useful they need to be free of toxic chemicals.
Designers of zero-waste architecture think about how their buildings will be taken apart just as they think about how they will be put together. Building is a verb not a noun.
In a "Cradle to Cradle" world the act of building does not downgrade resources.
Understanding some of the key concepts which provide a foundation for a carbon-neutral New Zealand potentially leads to a complexity and diversity of actions, rather than a limited array of "solutions" which can be applied without re-thinking the way we build.
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