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 Jimmy Morgan's Essay

Ok, I'm no Steven Hawking, but let me give you a brief history of time. The monkey-type character lasted about one million years, slowly fading away. Then until about 30,000 years ago, we shared planet earth with only a couple of walking apes. Now we are 6.5 billion people, growing by an exponential 80million per year.

We separate ourselves from other mammals due to consciousness. We blindly feel our collective intelligence and language is a cut above the rest. However, it is the advanced tools we have developed, with the ability to communicate with each other any where in the world, which has us really patting ourselves on the back.

So what's wrong with the planet? Although many choose to ignore it, we are simply consuming more than we can produce. If you think science will help in some sort of Malthusian miracle, imagine just for a couple more paragraphs that it might not. Imagine that we may have got our sums wrong and technology has actually removed our checks and balances. Imagine if the things that were meant to save us, actually turns on itself and makes it worse. Imagine if Louis Leakey was right, and "we are most certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our species".

Consider the amount of resources we waste just for convenient refreshment:

This sort of waste has to stop.

Not quite as wasteful as soda cans in principle, but more so in value, is the fashion industry. It accounts for an eyebrow raising 20% of all household spending - some more than others :). That's a staggering £148billion spent ever year on products, where often environmental corners are cut to make high street garments ever cheaper.

n an unorthodox move, the Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP), has called for a rental market to be established for the following goods:

• High-end clothing
• Glassware and Tableware
• Tools and Equipment
• Vehicles
• Telephone, audio and recreational equipment

Just like the IT industry has seen in the explosion of Software As a Service, the need to "own" things that the technology life cycle dictates will be destroyed soon after they are purchased, has been called in to question.

WRAP feels that renting products would lead to lower consumption of raw materials. Indeed, if only a fifth of the products in your home were rented, emissions would be cut by 2%. That's 13 million tonnes of CO2! We could even have smaller homes that are more efficient to heat and light, as we wouldn't need to store so much. Remember the last time you moved house? Remember the lorry-sized mountain of stuff you moved from one property to the next? How much of that stuff would you still have if you were renting it? Like I said, smaller homes!

It would however need a change in lifestyles, but it looks like a quick win. We certainly need to be inventive; demanding people change their 21st century aspirations will not work. Perhaps we can change people's daily habits, especially if it just means a change back to a previous methodology from a falsedawn innovation that was meant to save us. Let's consider the lean green paperless office. Of course, like the production of soda cans and T-shirts, that utopia is still powered by electricity. And in the United States roughly half of electricity comes from (not so lean and far from green) coal fired power plants. It's a level of energy consumption that I feel is also likely to become unsustainable.

Why we are able to consume more than we can make, is that "mother nature" has been operating a giant piggy bank on our behalf, saving since those early days of industrious monkey-type creatures. One of the most useful things in the larder is coal which like everything else we've used for thousands of years, has served us well. Perhaps our problem stems from using increasingly large amounts not for heating and eating, but facilitating a paperless static worker.

When you include the servers and the internet, many people say a 200MB file takes the equivalent of a bag of charcoal to download. However, let's instead work with the tightest of calculations, which say that it can be done by mining and burning just a pound of coal.

How many times do we download 200MB? It wasn't long ago that it was impossible. Then it just became expensive. Now, we probably do it before lunch. And what about that 14 GB movie? Not typical, but it's becoming more so. The important point is how steep this exponential rise has become. Just like the rise in population, it is the speed of growth that causes us problems. Yes, us to solve. There's only one boat, in one solitary ocean.

I'm not advocating an end to the download; just consider the utility of traditional conservations. We don't always need to ping giant files around the world to convince someone to see your point of view.

It's certain that with many post-industrial ideas, somehow we've lost our way. Search back through a few years of Annual Reports for an SAP500 company, watch the transition from out-sourcing, to home-shoring to near-shoring and back again. During this amazing period of uncertainty, it's often a good idea to take a step back to a previous working strategy before it's too late and the exponential graph gets too steep.

Perhaps that means sharing public transport and travelling to work in the same room. Sharing heat and light, printing documents once on paper and sharing them throughout the day, accessing them from a central place. Talking to one another across a desk - without the need for video capture, sound amplification and data transmission. And at night, sharing entertainment at the cinema, mindful that watching TV for just ten minutes a day, burns yet another pile of coal.

Because industrial society has only existed for 300 years, it's such a shallow culture by comparison to everything else – no wonder there are these teething problems. We have to keep trying. It's too late to say anything inspirational for my final word. However, I'm mindful that a diamond is a lump of coal that never gave up. So perhaps, during a festive season coming to a planet near you, a lump of coal might be so rare that it becomes a girls' best friend.

Evolutionary blip?
Decades #187 to #202

Read Tim's essay  |  Read Dave's essay
Read Amy's essay  |  Read Arpana's essay  |  Read Brian's essay  |  Read Guiomar's essay
Read Leina's essay  |  Read Marisa's essay  |  Read Premjit's essay  |  Read Rhys's essay
Read Scott's essay  |  Read Tara's essay  |  Read Jimmy's essay

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