The 11th Hour

After watching this video I know I would feel horrible designing anything that ended up in a landfill, even if one tiny piece ended up in a landfill it would be unacceptable to me. The fact that the world population was never over 1 billion people before industrialization is interesting. It shows how many people the world can support on its own without destruction of resources. Maybe we are being selfish or naïve to think that we could ever find a way to support billions of people on a planet that can only handle 1 billion residents safely. The idea of sunlight being the max amount of energy that could be produced is great, tapping into the “ancient sunlight” is when all of our problems started. Electricity could be seen as a huge problem if you look at it in the sense that before electricity existed, the only form of light after dark were candles. This forced people to do their work during the day and sleep at night. Now we can work all day and work all night meaning we can use up resources all day and all night. This is especially bad in America where there is no end to the workday and weekends barely exist. George W. Bush’s comment that “we don’t know what the consequences of climate change will be” makes him sound like the idiot he is. This whole video explains the consequences, what does he mean “we don’t know”?! The statistic that 90% of the big fish in the ocean are gone really disturbs me. The fact that ExxonMobil is worth more than all of the auto makers combined enrages me because with all that money they should have figured out a good source of clean energy by now. The best argument/ explanation in this film is that nature has no rights, it is viewed as property so it can be sold, abused, wasted, etc. How do we give nature some rights? Unfortunately in America what you need is lots of money to campaign for nature’s rights, more money than what the oil companies are going to spend contradicting your argument. It makes me so angry that some architect wants to build a rotating building in Dubai. Who trained him or her? Where do they get off wasting that much energy? How ignorant can a person be? Infinitely I suppose. I want to know why spiders can make webs that are 5 times stronger than steel ounce per ounce and what we are doing to try to mimic that. Nature has so many natural wonders that we could use instead of the horrible materials and processes we use today. If it takes America 40 years to come to the right decisions, how can we speed this up? In 10 years our situation will be so much worse than it is now. Some one with a lot of money should step in and fund commercials that show segments of the 11th Hour or similar clips. These commercials would be better fitted for children than the commercials they see now. Maybe climate change just needs to be accepted as a fact of life and the destruction of humans is inevitable some where down the line. Everybody wants high efficiency appliances and biodegradable products, so how to we make these the standard? Again what we need is lots of money to campaign for change. This money is out there, how do we convince the people who have it to use it for this purpose? What designers need to do is a complete overhaul of products that exist today. Architects and all other “creators” must join in as well. Make my cell phone out of some sugar cane product because I will go through at least 2 in a year. Stop making plastic water bottles! There are so many things that need to be fixed that it’s overwhelming. Maybe what industrial design needs to be is industrial re-design. We don’t need new things we need better environmentally friendly versions of what we already have.