Solving sustainability problems with more consumption
How Bjarke Ingel’s YES IS MORE ‘archicomic’ helped me look at the world’s problems in a new light.
We have one world and that world is dying. In fact, we are killing it. And we’re doing it with progress. The greatest challenges of our generation is probably going to be climate change and sustainability. In the haste to deal with these future defining challenges we often pit ecology and economy against one another, but are they really diametric opposites?
While reading danish Architect Bjarke Ingels’ YES IS MORE: An Archicomic on Architectural Evolution, I ran into a radical take on the problems of sustainability and consumption:
What if instead of lowering our consumption to achieve the coveted sustainability, we opted for consuming more?!
Counterintuitive if not plain crazy, right?
In YES IS MORE, Ingels argues that:
“The heated debated triggered by ‘Copenhagen Consensus’— Bjørn Lomborg’s (the Martin Luther of the environmentalists) initiative to put a price tag and a priority on Earth’s greates social and environmental challenges– unconvers a fundamental misunderstanting that pits ecology against economy as Good vs. Evil.
In fact, they are not diametric opposites, but rather two sides of the same story.”
In other words, what Ingels is trying to say is that today’s problems are not political, economical or even ecological. Today’s problems are simply design challenges.
The 10 Commandments of Good Consumption
The concept of Good Consumption introduces a disruptive idea: ecology shouldn’t be about regression, it should be about progress.
The paradigm shift starts with accepting the fact that “ecological initiatives will only work in the real world if they work as viable economic models. And business models based on wearing our natural resources are not viable models for long term growth”.
What Bjarke Ingels proposes is that we don’t accept the world as is but that we change it through sheer innovative solutions.
Solutions that allow us to:
Whether or not this commandments work as part of a sustainable framework or not is beyond me, but they do present pretty interesting design challenges.
YES IS MORE offers some (hypothetical) design solutions in the form of the design of A Society in Economical Symbiosis, but regardless the moral of the lesson is that we have to change the way we go about seeing problems.
All of this makes me think that we often let our lives adapt to our problems instead of adapting our problems to our lives. Instead of looking for problems we ought to be focusing on looking for solutions.
Which leads me to a couple of concepts that I really love.
Enter the world of Pragmatic Utopianism and/or Radical Pragamtics.
Pragmatic Utopianism
Bjarke Ingels’ Archicomic has at its core the concepto of Pragmatic Utopianism which is not that different from Ryan Holiday’s Radical Pragmatic concept:
This is why we need to start thinking like radical pragmatists — ambitious, aggressive, and rooted in ideals, but also imminently practical and guided by the possible.
–“How to Beat Perfectionism, Make Progress, and Find Happiness” by Ryan Holiday.
While I’m growing older as person and in work experience these concepts make a lot of sense to me.
You can change the world with your work and how you go about living your life, but change cannot come if you dare not do things differently. And I’m not talking about extreme changes. One step at a time and with consistency goes a long way.
Rome wasn’t build in one day as the say and neither are the meaningful changes in your life and in the changes that will make up for a better world.
So let us dream big, wake up and start working on what we have in front of us.
I love to write, mostly in Spanish, though in the last couple of years I’ve been slacking… this is me trying to get back in the game.
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