(This article was originally oublished in the March 2009 issue of HLI, Horticulture and Landscape Ireland)
The economic bubble has burst, bringing an avalanche of crises with it. We have peaked not just the global oil reserves, but most reserves of industrial metals, clean water, soil fertility and biodiversity. Innovation and critical thinking, as well as leadership have slipped from our cultural vocabulary after decades of self centred gorging within that bubble economy. To come through this will challenge all of our individual and collective abilities. But, I believe we have three or four fairly “easy” (or at least obvious) avenues to explore, building upon a combination of the strengths and orientation of our sector, and the needs of our time.
Rummaging through our collective toolbox of skills, perceptions and material resources, one of the first things to surface is design. Design is both process and product closely related to strategy and vision, both of which are desperately needed to find a way forward and out of the mess. We need to look at our options and needs through the lens of design, open to new possibilities and start thinking outside the box. If we rigorously apply the process, make it second nature, we will open new directions.
Looking on in exasperation as leadership flounders in the face of a global meltdown, I am thinking of ways to repackage my strategic and design insights to provide support and training for leaders. If we took this up as a challenge to our industry, I foresee localised teams of design consultants coming on to boards and committees at many levels, facilitating the development of sustainability visions and plans to achieve them I would be delighted to talk with any other design strategists who get my point and are ready for action.
We already work with living organisms and systems in our everyday activity. We understand (even if not always practicing) cycling and conservation of materials, how to grow, the factors of biological productivity. General awareness of all things green has exploded, and despite the recession, there is a genuine desire to maintain the momentum already set in green design, green building, green holidays and more. Climate change, food security, tight budgets: these only serve to underscore the urgency of shifting onto a greener and more sustainable footing.
Technology development and funding have been increasing steadily in the pursuit of more sustainable options, and at the forefront of this trend is “living technologies”: solutions based upon the natural functioning of living organisms and systems to clean our air, water and soils, to produce energy, to insulate our homes and more. The single economic sector still growing, even now, is “green technologies”, or “clean tech”. With a renewed push to bring down carbon and save energy, clean tech continues to interest investors, and will certainly provide the bones of a new economy. The EU recently committed us to significant reductions in CO2 over the coming decades. Pundits have warned the cost will be in the billions of euros (never mind the cost of non-action becoming incalculable). What seems to slip from the discussion is that every euro spent goes into someone else’s pocket. They represent jobs at a time they are desperately needed. We are already members of a crack team engaged in carbon sequestration for millennia. This is what plants do so well, and we are among those best positioned to fine-tune our activities to fit the (re)newed agenda of slowing climate change.
Energy audits, energy efficiency, food miles, urban flooding, water conservation…all topping the list of current agenda, and all within our remit. Living roofs and living facades on buildings are big business elsewhere in Europe and the world, as they directly support such agenda. Constructed wetlands, rainwater harvesting, and “biochar” are other green tech solutions which fit well with our sector.
As fuel costs and the need to reduce emissions conspire to make local food production the most economic option, once again we will be needed to redesign community green spaces, from front gardens to local parks as active components of a local food security strategy. And we know our plants the way nobody else does. We can develop specialty nurseries providing the wealth of edible perennials and woody stock which can be grown in Ireland.
Our sector holds many of the tools required for this transition; many of the skills can be updated, reshaped, properly positioned and better presented to assume our rightful place within a wider and diverse team.
We need to convene a national conference on Living Technologies and developing the green sector. Let me know if you’d like to help.
Erik is founder and CEO of TEPUI, a design consortium specializing in living technologies.
Erik (with Sinead FInn) produced the planning brief for incorporation of green roofs into Dublin's city development plan, is sustainable technologies consultant to the Qatar Foundation's Design Zone project, and teaches Ireland's first Masters level course in Sustainable Design and Innovation. He is a plant explorer, new crops researcher and sometimes orchid breeder.
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Follow-up article, July 2009
Follow-up article, July 2009 issue of HLI:
I have been watching the development of environmental industries since my own degree studies in Massachusetts in the 1980’s. At that time, my focus on environmental restoration and biodiverse native landscaping was considered esoteric if not downright impractical, and the only industry focused on this sort of ecological repair work was called “mitigation”. This was characterized by a combination of ignorance and green washing, allowing large scale development to destroy valuable ecosystems by promising to replace them elsewhere. Thus millennia-old wetlands were dredged and filled by the square kilometer, their intricate and irreplaceable systems and function “restored” with monocultures of phragmites.
We have moved on quite a bit from there in terms of sophisticated understanding and technologies, and not just for landscape regeneration. An ever-growing array of green technologies and strategies have captured the imagination and the marketplace, ushering in what many believe will be a new green era. In fact for the past year or so, sustainability related goods and services have been amongst the top three earners world wide. The reason? We have no options but to fix our systems if we want to survive.
Because everything is truly hooked together, economics, ecology and society rise or fall in concert. Students of history and archaeology know this through their study of collapsed civilizations. Now that we have largely acknowledged the reality of climate change and peak oil (as well as peak water, peak metals, food insecurity, limits of industrial farming…) the general sentiment has swung around to support an agenda which will drive the development of ecologically regenerative industries, as well as the development of strategies to provide most of our other needs in a more joined-up and earth-friendly manner.
The future looks bright for our own industry to diversify and develop new products and services which either deliver results directly, or can be used to support other industries in a complementary way. Whether Ireland will be able to take a place in the global green tech drive, and where that position will be relative to other nations is still a big question. To paraphrase eco-economist and think-tank leader Amory Lovins, ‘the future is clear. Either you will be selling green technologies or buying them’ At this point in time, Ireland is well positioned as a client, but not as a provider.
An EU survey published a few months ago noted that Ireland is close to the bottom of the list of innovators, but near the top of the list of “innovation followers”. The problem with this in terms of the need for our industry to move into the emerging market is that innovation necessarily contains an element of risk, and we are a risk-averse society. Even the newly announced Innovation Taskforce appointed to guide national policy is larded with entrenched academic and industry heavyweights and very thin on the sort of creative talents and innovators needed to forge a new and sustainable agenda. In other words, it looks decidedly non-innovative from the outset.
My previous article for HLI looked at the opportunities for our industry to provide leadership and create new services such as green roofs and edible landscapes. What I want to emphasise here are the basic strategic shifts we need to make if we are going to come out of the depression still running our businesses.
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