Pre-Class Post Week of 10.21.09

So this post comes two hours before class... certainly late. I apologize to you all but hope that it will be thought provoking for those of you who have a chance to read it before class starts.

I appreciated the authors' concern not only with industry or the environment but with both. The idea of a biosphere and a technosphere is really interesting but I do see one problem with particularly the biosphere disposal system that is proposed. I do think that most people would like to have their technical waste taken care of by the industries that created them, but I could definitely see an unwillingness or even inability to deal with biological waste in the appropriate ways. Does this simply mean that all biological waste can go to a landfill (which becomes a giant compost pile?) or will people be expected to compost at home? Very few people have enough space available to compost all of their biological waste. Beyond that, many people will have an aversion to dealing with a compost pile (which is essentially rotting matter), frankly some people just aren't into worms.

An interesting way to deal with this in our current climate would be to add another waste management system... a compost management. For those of us who would like to allow our bio-matter to feed the earth (which it clearly can't do contaminated by toxins in landfills) who are unable to compost due to location it would be a great idea to have a compost-management program that picks up our compost. This could probably be a free service (or at least very low cost) since profits could be made selling the fertile soil that the compost will create.

Chapter three mentions a "green" building that the authors worked on. I thought it was great that their ideas extended beyond being eco-friendly and that the building was also worker-friendly. "In fact this building is just as energy-efficient as the first, but that is a sisde effect of a broader and more complex goal: to create a building that celebrates a range of cultural and natural pleasures- sun, light, air, nature, even food- in order to enhance the lives of people who work there." (p74). This idea made me wonder how our "STEPS" building will rank both in terms of energy efficiency as well as enjoyable and healthy for people to work and study in.