The Point

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Persuasion

I just picked up the stellar (but almost star-like in weight) WorldChanging book, a print offshoot of the brilliant Worldchanging.org website and pretty much a compendium of some of the ideas that excite me most about the world we are wandering into these days. I hadn't planned on picking it up, actually, but Audrey's tempted me with their cursed 30% Off 30 Books propaganda and I couldn't resist.

Essentially it's a very pretty encylopedia of 'world-changing' ideas circulating in our world today. The Al Gore foreword is an interesting addition, although a direct connection to the buzz about An Inconvenient Truth is a little tenuous. While it deals a lot with practical, cool solutions being tried out around the world to address climate change, it is as much about participatory change, about becoming the revolutionary, as it is about icecaps and lightbulbs. (Incidentally [especially to my North American and European readers], if you're not using compact fluorescent lightbulbs yet, why not? MisEntropy comments here.)

Ideas range from pay-before-boarding bus stations in Curitiba (to make taking their amazing high-speed bus system easier and more convenient) to culturally appropriate and portable LED light sources for Huichol tribes in Mexico. There's lots of delicious eye-candy for design junkies, including pictures of a LEED-certified skyscraper (the highest international standard at the moment for environmentally sustainable and smart design) in Singapore, which I pored over for ages. It even talks about Huangbaiyu, as well as other villages in China 'green' building ideas are being tested out in.

As a compendium of ideas, it does tend to gloss over drawbacks in some of the projects it describes. About the hyper-cool Dongtan district being built in Shanghai to be walk/bike/bus-able, energy self-sufficient and almost completely independent in food production, for example, it ignores the likely impossibility of any of Shanghai's ample population of poor and migrant workers to afford housing in the area. I don't believe in any capacity that sustainability is the exclusive domain of the rich; it's a contradiction in terms.

As well, it talks a lot about cradle-to-cradle design, which made my heart all aflutter, but has some contradictions in how it talks about those ideas. In some sections it ramps up how groundbreaking and obvious designing things beyond a single lifetime is, but in others it unduly celebrates a culture of reducing, of efficiency, and of minimising bad instead of fostering a brand new (and brand old) good.

These things are easily overlooked, in my opinion, given the sheer volume of fascinating ideas. Not a cheap tome, but the thoughts within are a bargain. Keep in mind I'm trying to read this at the same time as Margaret Somerville's The Ethical Imagination, Carol Off's Bitter Chocolate, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, and make a dent in M G Vassanji's The In-between World of Vikram Lall. And learn Chinese.

It excites me because a year ago, a 'big' conversation in our society about changing the way we live would have been... not unthinkable but probably laughable. Something tells me change is in the air, and I want to get in on it.

A note: In my last post, I falsely implied a direct link between Novartis' lawsuit regarding one of its drugs, Glivec, and access to HIV/Aids drugs in India and throughout the Global South. In truth, Glivec is primarily a cancer-fighting drug, but Oxfam gives an analysis here of the probable impact of a successful lawsuit on Novartis' part on production of other generic drugs in India's booming industry. New patent laws there have created quite a bit of controversy, apparently. Read up.

Photo credit: Kit Seeborg (see, Amazon is good for some things) and Edward Burtynsky

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posted by Christopher at 1:36 a.m.

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