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LifeloggingI am Apollo Lemmon and this is my lifestream. I invite you to join me in my exploration of an integral life. I am focused on discovering what it means to live a life rooted in integral consciousness and I explore spirituality, art, community, technology, fitness and other aspects of a fully engaged life. I am now living in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
I can always be reached at apollo@apollolemmon.com
The Transcendent City is a gorgeous short film by Bartlett School of Architecture graduate Richard Hardy about an artificial intelligence network that coexists with its ecosystem. It's a welcome break from the presupposition that AI overlords would scorch the Earth.
In this film, machines are able to do what us meatbags can't — achieve perfect equilibrium with the environment.
Ken: Well, you can have an integral diet with or without meat. There are numerous reasons to have a meatless diet and many of them are economic, because it takes an enormous amount of grain to feed a cow and to get it to the point to produce a pound of protein. It requires something like a hundred pounds of grain for one pound of protein. So in terms of hunger for the world it is a big waste. Meat is a big, big economic waste. It’s very expensive to produce meat for food. Then there is all the garbage that goes into meat, as well as a lot of medical reasons for avoiding it, for example the disposition of our intestines not being prepared to digest it. I’ve seen approaches to this that make sense to me and they are approaches that use your genetic or blood background to determine if you need a lot of meat, some meat or no meat at all. Islanders live on fruit, while Tibetans practically all eat meat. The Dalai Lama gets very ill if he stops eating meat. It just makes sense to me that we come from different lineages and therefore we have different needs.
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Last night I read Paul Chadwick’s Concrete Celebrates Earth Day 1990, as much for the ongoing story as for the relevance to today’s Earth Day. Chadwick pointed out a lot of issues nearly two decades ago that are still incredibly relevant today; global warming, overpopulation, our failure to adopt environmentally sound practices and our failings in communicating environmentalism are all problems we have not adequately addressed.
Much of today will be focused on bringing attention to environmental problems and possible solutions and that is absolutely vital. But how we communicate environmentalism is something we need to look at very closely if we want to be successful in building a world that encourages everyone to live in ways that keep nature vibrant. The Concrete special includes a segment of Concrete talking about the challenge of getting conservatives engaged in environmentalism, and recommends recasting the environmentalist as a patriot. This sort of reframing environmental concern is vital in engaging as large a portion of our world as possible in action to protect life. We need to set aside our idealism and passion for the cause of environmentalism and pragmatically weigh our methods of presentation.
One of the greatest contributions of developmentalism –and integral theory more particularly– is the notion of altitude, or the fact that we have different levels of development as people and societies. People can be egocentric, ethnocentric or worldcentric, with only the latter group –making up only a small percent of the Earth’s population– caring about the entire world innately. Using awareness of these altitudes, we can more effectively communicate with people where they are instead of assuming everyone thinks in the same ways and has the same concerns.
An ethnocentric person, say a fundamentalist conservative, may respond better to environmentalism being in the service of their family, God and country than some of the ideals we, as environmentalists, hold. And we can work with that in ways like the one Paul Chadwick suggested years ago, by changing the messages we use. By focusing on local impact, the cost to humans everywhere and other pieces of the environmental concerns we have that are more relevant and visible for people not plugged in to the environmentalist movement, we can create more and better change. Pointing out the stakes people have in the Earth in a way they can understand and embrace is absolutely necessary if we can to succeed in protecting and advancing the Earth.
For more on environmentalism, I highly recommend Communicating Integral Sustainability and C4Chaos’ Environment blog entries.
We may soon be planting marigolds on the moon, but right now we need to be sure we are using our existing technologies well on Earth to feed billions of people. Treehugger is bringing attention to vertical farming that could be used to make urban environments more self-sufficient. “Vertical (Diagonal?) Farm from Work AC in NYC” first takes a look at a proposal for transforming a lot in New York City into a farm that stretches up to match the vertical reach of some skyscrapers. The site also comments on a proposal for Toronto and some ideas for more mature versions of the concept. It has been widely proposed that vertical farming is the future of agriculture.
Most of the world’s population will be living in cities in the coming decades and meeting the basic needs of everyone on the planet will be unavoidable if we wish to flourish. It is therefore important that we recognize the possibilities for efficient, safe and elegant ways to produce food we have available to us. There’s no compelling excuse for not building a future where everyone is fed with the best foods we can grow and I imagine vertical farming has a place in any well-rounded vision for feeding the future.
Today there is a movement happening in the blogosphere that is pushing environmentalism to the fore. Blog Action Day aims to have thousands of bloggers posting their take on the environment in order to increase the dialog around the environment. Some of my favourite bloggers have already provided their views, from C4Chaos’ writing on conscious capitalism and bright greens to Lighter Footstep’s call for individual action and wise leadership. Also check out the contributions of Integral Options Cafe, Craig Photography, and Integral Praxis, three of my other daily reads.
I try to keep my own stance pragmatic and wide. I’m in favour of using technology in every way we can to increase efficiency and quality of human life while simultaneously reducing harm to our environment. This, as far as I can tell, if entirely possible and is actually a major thrust of innovation already. Genetically enhanced plants, more efficient devices and smarter public transportation are among the tools we have emerging as viable changes for preserving and benefiting the environment. And we should be cheering on innovation and existing technology as a way to protect our world and to create the quality of life everyone can flourish with. We should not give up advancements for some romantic ideal of returning to nature. Spider Robinson, in “Sustaining the Planet” (PDF), sums this up nicely:
Some still doubt such things as global warming and urge against believing that humans have a tremendous impact on the earth. I don’t think the evidence points to that, but there is one simple and compelling argument that I was impressed with for whether or not we should work to reduce our emissions. What’s the worst that could happen?
What isn’t asked here is what do we do if we can’t slow or reverse global warming, whether it is caused by us or not. I think that if the worst predictions are accurate we can’t do anything now to stop global warming. What options do we have then? I think we have to seriously look at what we need to do to adapt to a world that is changed tremendously. Our lives and those of countless others will be threatened and the lifestyles that breed better humans will be lost. Can we afford not to plan for the preservation of a humanity far stronger than it has ever been before? Can we afford not to look at how other life would be changed?
And even if we just improve our technologies and live in ways that are more sustainable, what have we gained beyond survival? I don’t think any short survey could encompass all the benefits we can reap from being spurred into change by a concern for the world. If we shrug off fear, at least let us embrace the hope that we can create a better world.