Harmonizing the Future: Geoengineering, Living Architecture, and a Sustainable Blueprint
There's significant buzz around climate change, and the now yearly expectation of encroaching fires in my home province of British Columbia, as well of many parts of the rest of the world. These events bring the topic front and center for the majority of us sharing a planet. But amidst the din, how much is substantive dialogue, and how much is just noise? Are summits like the upcoming COP 28 going to bring about any substantive change?
Rewind to the times of Saturday morning TV, and Captain Planet was championing environmental causes, a sentiment that today feels eerily prescient. And while present events, like world leaders jet-setting to climate summits, can often feel contradictory, the emerging patterns—like forest fires followed by floods—underline the urgency.
But is alarm the right response? Alarm might lead to temporary solutions, short-term reliefs that do not consider the intricate system dynamics of ecology and climate science. Our world is a complex web – from our solar system to the layers of atmosphere, the forests, oceans, and the myriad activities of human civilization. Any model we employ to understand it will undoubtedly have shortcomings.
Amid government interventions and business sustainability efforts, there's an unsung hero: architecture. Think Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, an invention Bucky called 100 years ahead of its time, or Rachel Armstrong's "living architecture" – solutions that are not just responsive but are inherently adaptive to their surroundings. Armstrong's work with Venice's canals, for instance, shows that our buildings and infrastructure can evolve with the environment.
The beauty of such systems? They aim for balance. They can be computer-monitored, energy-harvesting, and even embody proto-organisms – entities that aren't alive but whose chemistry is attuned their environment with a specific purpose in mind.
The future lies in human creativity, hope and our ability to build adaptive systems. Consider homeostasis, a term from Biology that essentially means systems that innately balance themselves. A cell, for instance, knows precisely what to admit and what to exclude through its walls. We too can give our structures intelligence and employ sensors to provide them with feedback from their environment. Organizations like "Green Iglu" leverage geodesic dome design and vertical growing to demonstrate sustainability even in Canada's Arctic. Such concepts leverage current technology to challenge our traditional notions, advocating for an abundance-focused society rather than one rooted in scarcity and inefficiency.
Imagine a world where commutes don't rely on burning fuel or zig zagging around a city grid, but employ VTOL stations powered by renewables taking “as the crow flies” routes between work and home. Architecture, then, isn't just about buildings – it's about uplifting societies. It's about realizing those utopian visions we dreamt of in games like SimCity 2000 or we saw in the Jetsons. If these large scale changes disrupt old inefficiencies, benefit the people and planet living here, then the current focus could be on establishing a beautiful, sustainable, adaptable and proactive vision for society that people actually want to move towards rather then being frightened into.