Beyond the Drawing Board

Some days I take a look at the world, and feel an overwhelming desire to give up the superhero gig, pack my bags and wander the planet experiencing as many of its wonders as possible before the Greenland ice shelf melts and turns once peaceful nations into Mad Max styled dystopias.

This does not represent the sort of cheerful thinking that the development world needs.

My frustration stems not from the belief that we can't bring about the necessary changes, but rather from the reality that though there are tens of thousands of amazing ideas on how to create a sustainable planet, most of those ideas seem stuck in neutral. Meanwhile, society en masse pushes forward doing the same old unsustainable things, only faster, bringing us ever closer to the teetering edge.

Take for example cleaner energy. In the places where wind works, for example, it can be price comparable with burning coal or oil when one removes the benefits of government subsidies. Yet, in the United States anyway wind is still struggling to gain a foothold. The government continues to push for continued exploitation of coal and natural gas even when extracting those resources represents the potential destruction of a habituated region (Appalachia), as in the case of coal, or when those resources means exposing a local population to radioactive water supplies (Ithaca, NY) and no clear idea on how to deal with that radioactive waste.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, the European countries that have pioneered the idea that companies should have to take back their products when consumers are done with them seem to have stalled in its application. The idea was simple. If a business has to deal with the full lifecycle of a product, not only its production but also its disposal companies would be more inclined to make products that were easily and fully recyclable and less filled with toxic substances.

This inability for great ideas to really take off I think comes from two main ways of thinking. The first is that people have a tendency to cling to the familiar. As loudly as we complain about the environment, about the limited supply of fossil fuels, for those of us who have access to the fruits of our carbon addiction, the system is working. Not well, or perfectly, but well enough to make leaping into a different technology seem a bit too much like gambling.

The second reason stems from the idea that there is a single solution. There isn't. There is a plurality of solutions some which will work better in some locations rather than in others. Our best bet is likely to throw as many onto the wall and see which ones stick.

We need to move the ideas from the drawing board and into the world.