Beyond Sustainable Landscapes
- APEX PREDATOR
My March, 2011 post on rain barrels has generated a great deal of discussion both here on the blog and elsewhere. It seems to have gone viral and has been showing up all over the place. Prevailing opinion is favorable to my position that rain barrels are not useful and not sustainable. There are, of course, some dissenting opinions and nuances. If you missed the conversation or haven’t checked in to see all the comments, you may be interested in revisiting the article.
As interesting as all this is, it misses the real point. There is a meta-question that needs to be answered, and a proper answer will render moot much of the discussion about conservation and sustainability. I’ll cut to the chase: Why are we creating landscapes that do not survive on rainfall and natural soil fertility, and that for the most part do not offer up ecological services in excess of their negative impacts? Why should we waste our time and intelligence on trying to adapt to a paradigm that accepts landscapes requiring more resources than nature delivers, and to one that doesn’t ask anything of the landscape other than that it be pretty?
Yet much if not all of the activities generated by the sustainable landscaping movement (and indeed by the green building movement as well) assume a continued, if abated, consumption of resources, and rely more on novel technologies often of dubious merit (smart controllers, synthetic lawns, etc.) than on creating place-adapted natural ecosystems. This blindness to reality is going to kill us, more slowly than the old ways, but just as surely. We are evolving systems that destroy the planet but at a more languid pace, and there is an unspoken assumption that in our unquestioned strivings for luxury and comfort we will use everything up sooner or later. This is the elephant on the lawn that nobody wants to talk about.
SETTING A HIGHER STANDARD
Anyway, sustainability is not the issue. Defining sustainable as the standard sets the bar too low. Sustainability is about being “less bad,” in the words of sustainability’s Number One Guru William McDonough. I don’t agree with McDonough about everything, but I shall be forever grateful to him for calling out any approach that means only to reduce the negative impacts of an activity or structure. A so-called “green” building that merely cuts energy use or substitutes a less damaging material for a conventional one, or that hews to any or even all of the accepted standards for sustainable construction as codified in LEED or other standards, isn’t a good-enough building. It still has tremendous negative impacts both on and off site.
And landscaping is no different. Until we free ourselves from the conceit that a couple of rain barrels or some native plants and a drip system are an adequate response to the challenge of creating a living ecosystem that delivers more services than it demands, we will be forever creating sub-optimal projects.
Sustainability is not the issue. Adaptive productivity is the issue. Being less bad is not good enough. Being useful, beneficial, worth the costs is what we need to strive for, and nothing less will do. After all, everything is at stake, isn’t it?
Tags:conservation,consumption,ecosystem,energy,landscape,Landscapes,landscaping,LEED,Rain Barrels,Sustainability,Sustainable,William McDonough
Tags: conservation, consumption, ecosystem, energy, landscape, Landscapes, landscaping, LEED, Rain Barrels, Sustainability, Sustainable, William McDonough
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Wow, I have to admit, in terms of all the landscaping blogs I’ve come across, yours has the most unique perspective and is, of course, quite timely as sustainability and anything “green” are all the rage right now.
These are all very important things to consider as it’s not only good for business, but keeping in mind our “resource” expenditure, good for the earth as well.
Thanks! I try to keep it real and look deeper and get to the truth, whatever that is. I appreciate your comments.
I stumbled across your site and the rain barrel post while researching rain barrels. I have to admit I laughed long and hard. Not at your article, which is great, but at the fact I found it while writing an article for my company on why rain barrels are needed. Oh, those 30 pieces of silver….
My problem is with “magic manufacturing.”
I teach business classes. At some point we always get into the impact on environment and I can lay money on someone bringing up wind farms.
I then point out that the Keebler elves make cookies, not windmills. Standard speech: “Nothing is free. Do you know how much energy it takes to build a windmill? Not even counting mining the ore or pumping the oil, you have fuel for material delivered to the factory, electricity, fuel for forges, petroleum for the plastics, etc. Then you have to transport it to the site. Since over 75% of these are manufactured overseas that involves shipping to a port and putting on a ship. Ships drink fuel.
Once at the dock the average windmill takes 7 heavy duty transports getting about 3 to 5 mpg to move. Most come from the various ports to the central states. So that’s 7 trucks going 1,000 miles at, say, 5 mpg.
Do you know how long it’s going to take to conserve all the energy you used making that windmill?”
Too many people think anything that conserves energy is made with ‘magic manufacturing.’ Batteries for the Prius, rain barrels, windmills, even the cloth grocery bags that are so popular today all take energy to make and deliver.
Please conserve resources. I’d like for my grandkids to have a good life. But understand the ENTIRE cost of what you do, not just the feel-good part.
Thanks.
Thank you for your comments. It’s all true. We need to look at the big picture so that we don’t fall for delusional feel-good band-aid pseudo-solutions. We need to do full lifecycle analysis of everything. Of course, that’s not so easy. So how long DOES it take to recover the embodied energy in a windmill? Did you find out?
Like anything wrapped up in money/politics, answers vary greatly. One British estimate is that the energy payback from a wind farm is about 6 to 8 months. A different, 2006 study estimated 13 months, including the energy used constructing the foundation.
I have two problems with these studies. The first is with the numbers. Some of the numbers appear arbitrary/theoretical, as opposed to real world production numbers. Some focus on one turbine, some focus on wind farms. Most don’t include end-of-life figures for dismantling worn out turbines. It’s hard to pin anything down.
The second objection is my biggest: Every report I can find is done by someone promoting wind energy. Let me make something clear: if you tell me who is paying for a study, I can tell you the results without ever seeing it.
The most objective,well rounded study I found is at http://www.apere.org/manager/d.....iche37.pdf .
So yes, leaving social considerations out, wind farms do pay for themselves fairly quickly. Over their life span they should return 80 times the energy used in construction/installation/maintenance.
Beyond Sustainable Landscapes is why we created the permaculture club at the local Cabrillo Community College, designed an edible food forest and lobbied for curriculum change;2010-2011. Curriculum passed and Permaculture will be taught there, starting Fall 2012. This was a slog to do, and we had to prove our point relentlessly and speak to the ethics of land use, in the horticulture department and throughout different channels on the main campus and administration. It was worth it.
Excellent! Good to know about the program. Thanks.
I have one more thought on this. I suggest you deal directly with the importance of food growing as part of a regenerative landscape.
Yes, absolutely. We must move from destructive to restorative and from consumptive to productive. As rapidly as possible. Food is what we should be growing in cities, and native plants where appropriate.
One mention. I love the exchange I have read so far. I see honest valor within each post. Here is perhaps another angle of thought. Greed is a thoughtless and care-free ruler. It is certainly the basis of capitalism. It rules our economy. It rules the economy of every major industrialized nation in the world. It drives and determines the choices that are marketed or even forced upon its citizens, and that in turn influences the decisions and even shapes their perception of what is acceptable. It drives the captains of industry to cut down old growth redwoods to sell as beautiful patio furniture or decks… or garden boxes. It drives them to sell water in plastic bottles, and places your market goods into plastic bags. It drives politicians to deny global warming so we will continue to consume gasoline and oil and afford our children opportunities to attend top-notch schools that are not conveniently localized, visit grandma who lives two states away…. yada yada.
Yet if we stop for a moment and consider, the fuel of greed is completely regulated by the desire of those that feed it. Us, We are the target of the system. Like the field of dreams, “If you build it, they will come”. If you market it well, it will attract us. This ship (I will dub manifest destiny) we are on is on a death track as it stands. It WILL NOT turn on a dime (although it must). All we can hope for is to gather our collective strength in marketing a new lifestyle. A more localized lifestyle. A new manifest destiny. One where we do not have to shuffle our kids across town immediately after work, or one where we do not need to partake in delights from around the world on a regular basis, but rather partake, enjoy and celebrate the wealth of resources that are practically at our feet. The Native Americans had this lifestyle dialed in. But this lifestyle is not “profitable” and has therefore NEVER been “marketed”. It does not fit the mold we have been shaped to work within. It has never been mentioned, that is until the likes of pioneers like Henry David Thoreau and others who followed him on less notorious scales. folks like Owen, and Mr James, and even on a smaller scale, myself. I try to set the example in many areas, and admittedly I fail miserably in others. I have none the less influenced friends to grow their own food. Good for me. However, this alone is not enough. As Owen points out, the time for gradual change is past. The question stands: How to you make a giant ship turn on a dime? Do you start by setting the example? Do you market the example? How do you make “having less” sexy and desirable to those around you or even to yourself? And more importantly, how do you get past the giants at the gate?
Thanks for tolerating this mind spill…
Excellent thoughts, well expressed. Thanks. Yes to what you say: The ship will not turn on a dime, although it must. That is really the heart of things, isn’t it? The great paradox. We have painted ourselves into a corner (I am flirting with a catastrophic mixed metaphor here by placing us in a corner with our clumsy ship and a can of paint – sorry) and now what do we do? Even if everyone were on board with the urgency, and even if these nasty capitalists weren’t using everything in their power to induce us to continue destroying ourselves for their personal gain, even if everyone were pulling hard on the oars, we would still have a rough time with this situation. Man, it’s not such a great moment, is it? But let us do what we can, fully aware of what is at stake, and see what happens.