Growing Future
In our society, the problems that fill daily the newspapers and the entire media environment have something in common, they are dealt like single elements that need to be solved one at a time.
This approach comes from the last three centuries of mechanistic view of reality, that, after Galileo, Descartes and Newton has become a common interpretation of their incredible discoveries and methods.
Fortunately in the last century, the renewed knowledge of our universe as a consequence of relations between the elements, that shows emergent behaviors and effects on the entire surrounding environment, has made possible a slow but inexorable shift to the systemic view of the reality.
The systemic approach is based on fundamental interconnections of elements; these have influence on one another and all the changes made to an element changes the whole organism. Thanks to this approach we can analyze, understand and solve in simple ways much of today’s problems.
In large part the problems that the world is taking on are related with the environmental sustainability, like the pollution of the oceans, greenhouse gas production, the workers involved and pollution cost of natural resources and the wastes of product consumption.
The world community is coming out with always new ideas to solve those problems, and those ideas are becoming always more sustainable.
Mimicking ecosystem structure, the waste from an organism became the resource for another one; Cardboard to Caviar Project by Graham Wiles is an example of this logic. He used the waste product of a group of restaurants to produce Caviar.
Let’s see how:
First, the restaurants produce a lot of cardboard waste from unboxed products, and they pay Graham’s Company to collect them.
Then he shrinks that cardboard and sell it to stables as horse bedding, and after they became old he recollects them and is paid again by the stables holders.
The next step consists in feeding the worms with this used cardboard for compost, and then the worms are fed to the Sturgeons, that produce high-end caviar.
Finally, Mr. Wiles sell the caviar to the restaurant and they pay him to collect the new cardboard. [2]
His purpose was to transform a linear process to a cycle-loop that creates more value.
One other example, is the use of mycelium made by the Officina Corpuscoli[3].
The concept came from the research of new materials, materials that need to have high performances and sustainability. He reached this target with the natural process of the mushroom growth. Waste industrial products like sawdust or other production scraps became the base and the food of the growing mycelia.
The resulting product is a natural material with incredible characteristics and completely biocompatible.
Looking at the future, one of the more interesting possibilities is the construction of a growing process that could lead to reach new horizons in the building construction and energy supply.
Small but substantial steps in this way were achieved by plant-e project [4] in the energy field and by the architect Ferdinand Ludwig in the field of the construction process[5].
The first project, plant-e, developed a way to earn energy from the sugar-production process of the plants, without harming them.
The Architect Ferdinand Ludwig approaches the Baubotanik, german word that means Living Plant Construction, in his new research that studies a building approach to construct with branches, trunks and roots from trees.
The next step is the development, in the near future, of new modules and elements capable of growing completely new devices that supply the energy, the shelters and the instruments for future generations on a terrestrial or extra-terrestrial environment, becoming the new bricks of future technologies.
Bibliography
[1]Vita e Natura: Una visione sistemica. Fritjof Capra, Pier Luigi Luisi
Sitography
[2] Ted Talk _ Michael Pawlyn: Using nature’s genius in architecture _ http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pawlyn_using_nature_s_genius_in_architecture/transcript?language=en#t-776641
[3] Officina Corpuscoli _ http://www.corpuscoli.com/projects/the-growing-lab
[4] Plant-E _ http://www.plant-e.com/en
[5] Baubotanik, Ferdinand Ludwig _ http://www.ferdinandludwig.com
