Halcyon Imagines

Imagining a "new we"...

 

...emerging from the broad spectrum of lifestyle possibilities available in a variety of new sustainable communities around the world.

Imagining reacting to how others are really living, right now...

 

...in many parts of the world, while we sit here blogging, tweetng, facebooking and passing the days in other, ever-novel forms of self-indulgence. 

For example, in Ghana, children burn electrical components to melt off the plastic and reclaim the copper wiring - releasing toxic chemicals into the environment in the process while, in Brazil, man-made fires clear land for cattle or crops.  (Thanks to Greenpeace for this salutary reminder.)

Startling as these anecdotes are, other sources such as Worldmapper can show us the bigger picture about the world we live in, by mapping the state of the world's most pressing issues, while other maps show e.g. the geographical prevalence of different diseases around the world.

Imagining the potential of biomimicry

 

Visiting Luc Schuiten's Vegetal City exhibition in Brussels served as an eye-opening introduction to the potential that biomimicry might play in helping us design a sustainable future.

Many projects are already underway; some young architects are designing structures made completely out of living trees, while others are imagining how our great cities might return to their more natural state. 

A new website tries to organise all biological information by function and asks the question - what can we learn from this organism (e.g. any inventor, anywhere, at the moment of creation, can ask "how does nature remove salt from water?")

Meanwhile, engineers say a forest of 100,000 "artificial trees" could be deployed within 10 to 20 years to help soak up the world's carbon emissions.

Imagining knowing the real impact of all that we buy

The inevitability of ecological transparency sometime soon will lead, one hopes, to a far greater understanding of the impact of all that we do and buy.

So what do we value more - transactions or relationships?

Historian Niall Ferguson suggests that much of what's gone wrong with the global financial system stems from the triumph of tranactions over relationships, the triumph of "Planet Finance", with its derivatives valued at around USD700 trillion, over "Planet Earth" with its annual global GDP of only USD50 trillion.

Is this just the largest scale example yet of the growing global imbalance between value and values - i.e. between how much people are worth outwardly, in terms of financial value, and what they're worth inwardly, in terms of values-driven behaviour (compassion, sustainability etc?)