Sustainability with all its systems thinking, entropy, Hubbert curves, ecological footprints, bloom energy and the phenomenal advancement in all types of alternative energy- farming, since 1990, have reached a third gear. Furthermore, constellation of international bodies with their subsidiaries and policies like carbon credits, emission taxes, sustainability compliances and the eventual whole new financial markets on green stocks, carbon stocks and other weather derivatives took the movement to much a serious level. Needless to say, internet, digitalization and smart technologies certainly have leap-frogged this imperative. Now, for good, it has become a meme and it is inherent in every contemporary culture and governance. But the sad news is inability to efficiently and effectively permeate this to every nook and corner of human activity before the planet’s web of life has reached threshold. While searching for old e-mails on this concern, i found two examples (relatively less popular), which i thought of sharing, not just for their importance but for their brilliance too.
Sustainable Architecture
Chuck Hoberman, marvellous architect, designer, and artist explains how he defies existing degrees of freedom, and how creatively he distorts conventional symmetries, patterns, relationships between structures and trajectories only to leap beyond smart tech for transformative construction. Each one of us wants to have a micro-environment or microcosm (home) that reflects and conforms one’s identity and -isms to have control in one’s hands against the macrocosm (world). So buildings keep coming up as long as man exists. So Chuck's ideas have lot to contribute to this ubiquitous necessity of man. It has a strong say on sustainability. Click this for fantastic video.
Sustainable Luxury (Perfumes)
If you have strong inclination towards perfumes and fragrances, I can assume that you'd be very familiar with all those basic concepts like scent-layers, receptors and "shape" theory. But this guy, Luca Turin, has come up with "Frequency Theory" for how we sense smell. In simple words, contrary to "smell of a molecule is determined by its shape”, his theory tells that our sense of smell is determined by the frequency of a molecule. The strong underlying message is that we don’t have to exploit anymore for molecules (extracts of herbs, trees, flowers, animal glands, animal fats etc) that have exact shape. Instead, simply manufacture molecules (synthesize) that have same frequency as say Musk or Sandalwood. This invention smells beautiful, isn’t it? Here is the video.
