No place to stand on Earth?

When we hear what Archimedes claimed, given a lever and a place to stand he could even move the earth, we sit back and smile. There is no possible place to stand, we smirk.

The right footing also seems to be the problem today when the world is asked to pull herself up by the bootstraps. How can we get to addressing these big changes we need to make in our very own lifestyles if we want that figurative lever to work?

It was only last week that I sat among a group of experts who were offering their views on what we see today as trends into the future, especially in the context of all that we have to build to protect us from the elements--whether it is a box called a house or an office; or those boxes that transport us or offer us transit places to stay. So as the discussion wore on, I was accosted by that inevitable question from a panelist, 'So what do you see as the trend emerging?'

There was another day some 200 years ago when life was much simpler without any notion, yet, of securing anything beyond one’s own means or those resources around you. There was the forest. There was the river. And all things came as food, clothing, and shelter from these resources around a village, town or a settlement. That was a world that could take care of itself in its various different forms and regions.

So what happened over the last 200 years is that it gave us the ability to produce more. The 'it' in this case is what we have come today to admire and revile: ‘the market’. We hate it, but we can’t do without it.

If you look at this span of the last 200 years, and then the last 10 years of convulsive change that has shown us the vulnerability of Earth and therefore scared us out of our own possible existence, you then begin to see a pattern.

It was Steven Spielberg who made that memorable film, Back to the Future. That was the phrase that first gained currency in the mid-70s with people like Alvin Toffler and before him, other thinkers of deep ecology. What we are seeing today is a bunch of buzzwords: full autonomy in energy, water and waste that severs your reliance on a City Corporation’s infrastructure for these resources; ‘sustainable development’ of buildings and our cities; ‘rapid renewables’ that reduce your consumption of exhaustible resources of the planet; and a host of other such thought directions which essentially are telling us of how we need to go back, in a sense, to that past which can help us see and manage our future better.

The trick is to combine the benefits that 'the market' has offered as a mechanism, while we drive hard and with focus the need for bringing a pre-industrial society where we don't centralize our challenges.

If a city chose to have every dwelling manage its own waste, reduce its dependence on water, generated its own energy to see that it eschews its need for external energy support…, we will then see a sharp and dramatic reduction in our reliance on market mechanisms.

The world is baulking at this prospect of ‘letting go’ of the markets and profits and power that these centralized agencies have given to a select few in all market-driven areas of life. It is not easy for Business and Government to divest themselves of these opportunities that such infrastructure creation offers. Such forces clearly see a threat to business and money spinning potential. They are willing to redefine business with a very fresh perspective that will empower the customer to the point that market need will be wholly created in a way that has seen no precedent in the past. It is much like asking a farmer to leave his land fallow for a whole season before he takes to a different crop. He resists the idea for it means loss of income for that one season, while he forgets the reward after one such fallow season will be far higher.

How do we, as a race and as captains of government and industry change the very way we think, and offer that space for us to leverage the change, is a question that this larger trend we see today will help us answer within the next 10 years.

Why 10 years? All that we have seen today as need for growth, is changing at least ten times in its size and dimension over just this next decade. If, for example, we have had a total of 100,000 rooms in the hotel industry created in all of fifty years, we will see in just the next ten years, the creation of an additional 100,000 rooms in just the next decade! This means the using up of as much cement and steel and timber and flooring materials, as the hotel industry has done in all of fifty years in India. This boggles the mind, for there is simply no such ability to secure such materials in as short a time as ten years, unless there is a complete new way of building that we invent.

While it is easy to despair at such a prospect, what I can see is huge opportunity there. Opportunity to fill a void, a need, with technology, and a return to that past which has a storehouse of wisdom: go local; find ways of enhancing your autonomy with technology options that help you take advantage of being small, while the economic benefits of access to a globalized world is used where needed.

Will we now want to scoff at Archimedes? Or will we find a possible place to stand and to bring ourselves up by our own bootstraps? Darwin discovered where we stand while pulling ourselves up. His great contribution, 200 years ago, was to suggest a mechanism to allow simpler forms of life to reach up, and bootstrap, to more intricate and sophisticated forms.

Therein lies a trick or two on what we need to do to invent our future. This is not fiction. If this was 2125, one of our grandchildren will smile at our myopic vision of destruction at the mass scale for a shorter term benefit, with much the same air of indulgence that we smile at Archimedes's idea.

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Hariharan
28 Oct 2008