Green Technology Forum

What if we make an all-out, global effort to slow global climate change. How long will it be before we see signs of improvement? Months? Years? Most experts believe it will be decades before our efforts to slow climate change will result in measurable changes at the global scale. After all, the causes of global climate change—increased carbon emissions, deforestation, overpopulation—have been at work for over two centuries, and we’re just now seeing their effects at the global scale.

But how will societies accustomed to quick fixes and instant gratification cope with the time lag between today’s efforts to slow global climate and the visible results of those efforts decades from now? My fear is that, in the absence of quick improvements, some may lose interest and simply stop making the effort.

And let’s face it, our global environmental predicament is going to get worse before it gets better. That’s just the way causes and effects work at the global scale. We have only now begun to turn the ship and begin correcting the habits that have led to the current global condition. Even with the current popularity of all things green in the U.S. and Western Europe, we’re only talking about slowing the rate of increase in carbon emissions, deforestation, overpopulation, and other causes of global climate change. Nobody is talking about reducing them.

Until the effects of today’s efforts roll up into measurable improvements in the global ecosystem, who will have the heart to stay the course? Who will keep pushing to reduce carbon emissions as the effects of global climate change worsen over the next several decades? Politicians? Unfortunately, our political system, in the U.S. at least, seems to reward short-term thinking. Green politics may be a hot topic today, but how many politicians will continue to push for environmental reform when its popularity fades in favor of the next big thing?

Businesses can sometimes be equally short-sighted. We’ve all seen the placards in hotel rooms touting the management’s environmental awareness as they ask us to reuse our dirty towels and bedding. But their conscience too often stops at this one gimmick, which just happens to save them money. Will businesses push to find new ways to reduce global climate change if consumers stop demanding green products and services?

Will scientists search for new insights and evidence to fight global warming if it no longer means big grants and research contracts? Will even the non-governmental organizations often labeled environmentalists move on to other environmental challenges if donors lose interest in the issue of global climate change.

The answer is that it’s up to each one of us to stay focused even as our global environmental predicament seems to worsen over the coming decades. Fortunately, if we continue our efforts to slow global climate change, there will be smaller victories that may sustain us. Reduced rates of extinction, habitat loss, deforestation and soil erosion can all make a dramatic difference at the local scale. These local victories will eventually add up to global effects. And if you need inspiration as we set out on the long road to a greener world, I offer this story:

“One day during his tenure of office as Administrator of Morocco, at the turn of the century, Lyautey, the famous Marshal of France, was riding through a forest when he came to a spot where a storm had uprooted some giant cedars, leaving large empty spaces in the grove. Lyautey called to his side the Director of Forestry who, with other officials, was accompanying him on his tour of inspection. ‘Look here,’ said Lyautey, ‘you will have to plant new cedars here.’ The Director of Forestry smiled. ‘Plant new cedars, sir? But it takes two thousand years to grow one of these trees.’ For a brief minute Lyautey looked surprised. ‘Two thousand years?’ he exclaimed. ‘Two thousand years? Well, then–we must plant them at once.’”

The current green craze is flawed because it perpetuates a false relationship between us and the Earth. In most cases, it still depicts the planet as a collection of resources to be conserved and cherished. Granted, that’s much better than treating it as a collection of resources to be squandered and abused, but it still suggests a slightly disturbing view of the relationship between humanity and the Earth.

It’s disturbing because it sets us apart from nature. To think of ourselves standing apart from the web of life as observers rather than participants is to misunderstand the order inherent in the design of the universe. As the poet Robinson Jeffers put it:

The greatest beauty is organic wholeness,
the wholeness of life and things,
the divine beauty of the universe.
Love that, not man apart from that . . .

Behind the rush of the current green movement is the question:

What is nature to us?

We are of it, not apart, and yet we are its conscience, aware of it and our place in it in a way that no other creature can be. What we are to nature is stewards.

Through the green movement we are undoubtedly moving toward stewardship, learning the wholeness of life and things, and learning to think long term. As a result, almost all of us now recognize that our actions today will affect the world tomorrow, just as we recognize that yesterday’s environmental transgressions are taking their toll today.

But do we really see ourselves as integral to nature’s wholeness, or outside it? Will we use biotechnology and nanotechnology to try to control nature as a collection of resources or will we use them in the service of stewardship? How do we even define the difference?

I’m not against the green movement, just vigilant as to its outcome. Will it dissipate, giving way to the next big thing? Or will it cause a lasting, fundamental change in our relationship with our planet? It’s up to us.

“Nature, in the common sense, refers to essences unchanged by man; space, the air, the river, the leaf.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

For Emerson, it was important to define nature in a way that clearly distinguished it from the changed landscapes of towns and cities, factories and farms brought on by increasing urbanization and the Industrial Revolution. For him, nature was a refuge for the soul, a precious jewel in an increasingly human-made and yet dehumanizing landscape.

His reverence for nature as distinct from the human-made landscape fostered a movement to preserve and protect the remaining unchanged lands, a movement that culminated with Teddy Roosevelt and the National Parks system. Today’s parks and wilderness preserve the idea of nature as untouched, but in fact Yosemite, Yellowstone and most other “natural” landscapes are carefully engineered. Forests, wildlife and waterways are all managed, a far cry from the untouched expanse that greeted the first settlers.

Emerson foresaw that technology threatened to overwhelm nature, leaving us precious few landscapes untouched by human intervention. And time has proved him right. Today it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between natural and artificial landscapes, and most of us, when we picture a scene from nature in our minds, in fact picture one of these managed environments.

In one sense this represents the end of nature as distinct from the human touch, as almost every inch of the earth has been altered, either directly through development or environmental management, or indirectly through side effects of industrialization like acid rain and global warming.

But while technology has overwhelmed nature, it has left its fundamental building blocks—trees, rocks, animals—unchanged. We may alter or design the relationship between these things when we manage a forest or carve out a subdivision, but we have yet to change the essence of a tree. Until now. Nanotechnology and biotechnology have already empowered us to change the essence of nature’s most basic building blocks. Most of the corn we eat, for instance, has been genetically modified. In some cases, these modifications are irreversible and contagious; genetic modifications cannot be simply engineered out, and genetically modified organisms frequently spill over into the unmodified population, spreading uncontrollably.

Emerson faced the challenge of technology encroaching on nature, and since his day we have used increasingly powerful technologies to eradicate much of nature, leaving the rest equally subject to human design, conforming only to our contrived image of “nature”.

What Emerson did not foresee was the development of technologies so powerful they could alter the genetic or molecular makeup of nature’s works. The convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology and information technology now empowers us to change not just the appearance of nature, but its essence. In Emerson’s day, nature was that which lay beyond human intervention. An inheritance from God, it would remain pure in its essence as long as we chose not to disturb it. Now it appears irrevocably altered in its appearance, and increasingly altered in its essence. Now, having already undone it as Emerson defined it, we must consciously choose how we will define nature, what we want it to be.

As I discussed in a recent post at nanotechbuzz on Brian Eno’s talk, Before and After Darwin, nanotechnology can sometimes lead to insights into how nature works. Those lessons can then be applied to the design of new materials. Let’s look at a work in progress where scientists looking at nature at the nanoscale have made some discoveries that could transform whole industries.

Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of California, Santa Barbara have found an optimized adhesive contained in bone, abalone shells and spider silk that could be used in “glues” for nanocomposite materials such as carbon nanotubes and graphene sheets.

Researcher Paul Hansma said these optimized adhesives hold strong elements of materials together and yield just prior to the elements’ breaking points so as to prevent the entire structure from breaking. “Abalone shell and bone can heal themselves due to the weak bonds, such as hydrogen bonds or ionic bonds, that can reform,” he explained to PhysOrg.com.

In a paper published in the journal Nanotechnology, the research team draws these conclusions:

1. Nature is frugal with resources: it uses just a few per cent glue, by weight, to glue together composite materials.

2. Nature does not avoid voids.

3. Nature makes optimized glues with sacrificial bonds and hidden length.

Their observations of nature open the door to new insights into artificial glues and the promise of stronger, lighter, more efficient and economical adhesives. Thanks nature, for providing a valuable lesson, and thanks Dr. Hansma and company for unearthing it.

It couldn’t have been done without the nanotech tools to observe nature at the nanoscale, and I’m always delighted when I see scientists using these new tools to unlock nature’s secrets and show the way to new materials and products.

I hope the developers of new nano-based products will keep nature in mind and that we’ll see, for example, the discoveries described here lead to a new class of adhesives that far exceed current ones like urea formaldehyde, which is classified as a probable human carcinogen by the EPA.

The biggest obstacle to sustainable living today is our lack of contact with the natural environment. The average American spends 18 hours indoors for every hour outdoors, and most of our outdoor time is spent in unnatural settings like parking lots and city streets. As a result, we have lost touch with nature—the rhythms and patterns of life outside our engineered, air-conditioned world.

Our lack of experience with the natural world makes it difficult to evaluate alternatives as we strive for sustainability as a species. How, for instance, can we gauge the environmental impact of one detergent over another when we don’t know where our water goes?

Lacking experience on which to base our decisions, we rely instead on manufacturer claims to evaluate products and politicians’ promises to evaluate policies. Our reliance on second-hand information, in turn, makes us vulnerable to “greenwash”, intentionally misleading campaigns to make environmentally hostile products ands policies appear green. Victims of our own ignorance and those willing to take advantage of it, is it any wonder that many of our products and policies continue to harm the environment despite our good intentions.

The cure for nature deficit syndrome, as it’s sometimes called, is of course nature. We can all take steps to develop our environmental awareness:

Walk to work - Walking every day along the greenest route possible not only puts us in touch with nature, it can heal our hearts and minds.

Take a hike – When the opportunity arises for more extended forays into nature, take it. Weekend hikes are within reach for most of us, providing a chance to reconnect with the rhythms of nature.

Plant a tree – I hardly live in the wilderness, but yesterday when I arrived home a red-tailed hawk swooped out of the bushes carrying a mouse in its talons. Without the landscape around my home, I doubt it would have been there. The National Wildlife Federation offers a Gardening for Wildlife program that can help get you started.

If you run a business, consider how your products and services could make your customers more aware of their natural environment. Games can encourage kids to go outside and explore. Remodeling can be an opportunity to open up the home to the outdoors.

Employers can also take action to put their employees more in touch with nature. Rewarding them for walking or biking to work, for instance, can make them more aware of their local climate, vegetation and wildlife while also making them more fit and more productive. Biophilic design of the workplace can help too. Biophilic design is based on the concept of biophilia—our genetic dependence on contact with nature. It promotes natural materials, air and lighting, indoor plants and organic water features, and maximum exposure to nature. Its proponents cite a variety of studies suggesting it can improve worker productivity and health.

In implementing strategies like biophilic design, keep in mind that the goal is to encourage direct experience of nature. Other strategies like energy conservation and recycling are equally admirable, but they may not succeed if their adopters lack direct environmental experience. It is nature, after all, that teaches us these basic principles of conservation, and in nature we see their benefits and challenges play out.

Without our own direct experience of sustainability in action, our own actions can be easily misdirected, lead to unintended consequences, and fall prey to greenwash and political rhetoric. With direct experience of the green world to guide us, we can begin to heal our fragile Earth.

Through nanoscience and molecular biology we are learning more about how natural systems, organisms and materials behave, and nanotechnology and biotechnology give us the tools not only to intervene in those systems, but to create new ones based on their capabilities.

The lotus leaf is a good example. By studying its molecular makeup, scientists have unlocked its hydrophobic (water-repellant) properties and incorporated them into a new breed of materials capable of shedding water completely. The NanoNuno umbrella, for instance, dries itself completely after a downpour with just one shake. Developers are applying the hydrophobic properties of the lotus leaf in a wide range of products and materials from self-cleaning windows to car wax.

Nature offers endless lessons that could be applied to future products, processes and materials. By examining the nanoscale structure of gecko feet, for instance, scientists have created gloves so adhesive a person wearing them can hang from the ceiling. All of these lessons will enable us to learn from nature to create systems, materials and devices that are less wasteful and more efficient. Nature does not waste, and through biomimicry we will learn to model our own systems with the efficiency, beauty and economy of natural systems.

The study of ecology and ecosystems has long told us that natural systems are more efficient, more balanced, and less harmful to their surroundings than human systems. But until now we have lacked the technical ability to copy those systems because of their complexity. Nanotechnology and biotechnology, however, give us that ability to a remarkable degree. By tweaking matter at the molecular and cellular level, we may reproduce the properties of complex natural systems. Through expanding nanoscience and bioscience, we will learn more about nature’s remarkable ability to create and maintain systems with zero energy loss and zero waste. Nanotechnology and biotechnology may then provide the means to reproduce those systems and create new ones modeled on their behavior with increasing accuracy. The result will be new human systems with the attributes of natural ones–greater efficiency, less waste, and fewer harmful side effects.