Design and Innovation for the New Normal: When Storms go Super and Disasters Turn Mega

They are passing out free blankets in New York City—25,000 in a city where a million people are still without power, shivering as the temperatures drop and forecasters talk about a possible nor’easter. It sounds Dickensian, but the scope of the disaster grows more daunting by the day. It’s hard to help so many suddenly thrust into such need. 

Still, people—lot of people—are trying to help in any way that can:

• tapping fireplugs and trekking up dozens of flights of highrise stairs to deliver jugs of water to the elderly

• organizing a bagel / water / supply runs via Twitter from Brooklyn to Manhattan 

• rallying “Hurricane Hackers” to whip up some insti-apps for humanitarian response

• stringing up extension cords outfitted with power strips so pedestrians can recharge cell phones, delivering free pizzas, offering free medical and vet services

The first of what will likely be many star-studded televised fundraisers has already aired (quick—who remembers Bono, Jay-Z and Rihanna belting out Haiti Mon Amour / “We’re not going to leave you stranded” less than two years ago?) 

The images of uprooted trees morph all too easily into a metaphor for cities, neighborhoods and families. The death toll doesn’t come close to telling the story of lives shredded and futures left up in the air. 

Upon entering the main office area of the volunteer center, a little girl rushed up to whoever she thought knew anything about anything. (Most people don’t. To my surprise, it was pure chaos.) She wanted insulin for her mother, who wasn’t able to come down 16 flights of stairs in darkness. There was none to give out. She took the last of the ice packs and was told that it will help keep whatever insulin left in the house cold (and I suppose longer lasting).

—Thaniya Keereepart / a volunteer working in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood

How life-scarringly frightening for that little girl. And how potentially deadly for her mother, and so many others whose manageable chronic conditions require a reliable supply of medicines.

The past few years have been filled with record-breaking storms, droughts, fires, floods, earthquakes (some of which may have been triggered from the weight of flood-waters). Calamities now come super-sized. 

But it is one thing for a tornado to wipe out Joplin, Missouri, a small city in Midwestern flyover territory, and quite another for a massive, for-the-record-books hurricane to deal a body blow to the media-saturated Eastern Seaboard. 

If there is any good-ish news, it is that Sandy blew away any political need to tip-toe around the climate change debate. The spin-doctors have been literally out-spun. 

STRONG ANGEL

A few months after Hurricane Katrina, I was invited to be part of massive humanitarian response exercise organized under the auspices of the US Navy called “Strong Angel III” (SA3). It brought together roughly 800 people from 200 organizations: a mix of Silicon Valley and Seattle-based techs, academics, DARPA researchers and military personnel.

Basically, it was a weeklong hackathon, set against converging disaster scenarios unfolding in real time. The deafening roar of planes taking off and landing at the nearby San Diego airport added to the  ”life during wartime” reality at headquarters, an acoustically challenged, abandoned, open cavern of a structure.

SA3 helped kickstart everything from crisismapping and crowdsourced disaster database design, to better communications software for first responder coordination. The site was strewn with disaster tech, from inflatable, portable satellite dishes to Buckminster Fuller-inspired foam-core yurts. My job was to figure out what was happening and write daily missives for the organizers. The techs brought their gear. I brought my notepad. 

It was a front row seat to something truly amazing—something that actually made a difference, not only in terms of disaster tech innovation, but also in deepening connections across disciplines and institutions. SA3 veterans have gone on to pioneer local capacity-building innovation labs in developing countries (InSTEDD), crunch big data to improve disaster forecasting (UN Global Pulse) and develop ever whiz-bang-ier (if platform preferential) mapping tools (Google). 

All of this, of course, is great, but the disasters are still outpacing the tech. The only way to get ahead of this deadly curve is rethinking the metrics of good design and innovation. 

DON’T MESS WITH MOTHER NATURE: SHE ALWAYS BATS LAST

I first heard the axiom, “Nature Bats Last,” while filming a television documentary on coyotes. For more than a century, livestock ranchers in the West have waged war on coyotes, slaughtering them by the millions, using everything from poison-laced land  mines to aerial shooting sprees. But not only are there more coyotes than ever, they have expanded their range and have also adapted to life in the big city, from Los Angeles to Chicago. 

It turns out that left alone, only a pack’s alpha and sometimes beta pairs mate. But when the pack structure is destroyed, everybody mates, mates at a younger age and has larger litters. Wily critters, indeed. 

Yet when wolves were added back into the picture—as was done in Yellowstone—the coyote population dials back in a hurry and stays at reduced numbers. 

The point goes beyond nature’s brilliance at finding balance, to systems thinking, or rather ecosystems thinking.

From micro to macro, this is how the system works. We couldn’t live without our gut fauna, for example, but those populations have to be in balance, too. 

The only choice is whether to work within the rules or to be slapped down by those rules when we try to defy them (see fossil fueled business-as-usual). 

SUSTAINABILITY, RESILIENCE AND DESIGN

In the wake of Sandy, a simmering debate about whether the focus should be on sustainable solutions or resilient ones has spilled over onto the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. It is a rather ridiculous either / or option. 

It is true that the greenest, LEED-est building in the world is bound to topple if located in a flood zone, but to conflate sustainable technologies and poor site planning is silly. Likewise, resilience, the meme du jour, depends on circumstance, which can be inconveniently—and sometimes literally—fluid. My brain fogs wading through Harvard Business Review case studies on resilient companies. The bottom line is that it always depends: What works for one company at a certain point in time may not work for another. As Barack Obama noted, the era for horses and muskets in the military has passed. 

Nor does the “the science of resilience” take into consideration the resilience of problems, e.g., the feedback loops ignited by GHGs altering the atmosphere, or, for that matter, coyotes. Resilience is neutral, a characteristic informed by perspective. 

Far more useful and to the point would be the development of a set of guiding design principles for navigating an increasingly erratic, dangerous world.

Years ago, covering energy stories for BusinessWeek, I interviewed Amory Lovins, chief scientist at Rocky Mountain Institute. Although our conversation focused on distributed power generation, it quickly became obvious that the notable characteristics—small, modular, flexible, adaptable, scalable, interchangeable and cheap—offer an edge in efficiency and durability almost no matter what the issue. From energy distribution to food distribution, or data bundles to cells, or architecture to public health campaigns, these are good metrics both to direct and judge innovation. 

LEMONADE FROM LEMONS: LEARNING FROM THE MASTER

Nature doesn’t “bounce back” as the resilience pundits would have it, but bounces onward. Change is an integral part of the equation, with recycling, upcycling and endless cycling the means of transformation. Poisonous outputs become productive feedstocks. There is no garbage, only opportunity. 

Survival of the fittest turns out to be collaborative affair, full of shrewd symbiotic horse-trading: energy for shelter, nitrogen for nutrients, protection for honeydew. 

So we find ourselves at what optimists call a teachable moment. Fortunately, we have a great teacher. If “Nature bats last,” why not play on her team, or at least follow her playbook?  

In the last decade, biomimicry—looking to nature for design inspiration—has gone from the fringe to the mainstream in large part to Janine Benyus’ tireless efforts. This is not exactly Nature as a cheat sheet, but once you get into the biomimicry zone, nothing seems impossible. If a leaf can turn sunlight into energy, why can’t we? (see Daniel Nocera). 

Marry biomimicry and 3D printing technologies and suddenly the possibility of creating major structures—buildings and bridges—modeled on the latticework design of bones, light and strong, seems feasible. Construction materials might even be found on site, just as paper wasps turn leaves into sturdy hives with some water and enzymes. 

Weave in ecosystems thinking and things start to get even more interesting. Growing Power, MacArthur genius Will Allen’s urban farm in Milwaukee, is all about connecting inputs and outputs, from worm castings to waste heat. Meanwhile, ZERI (Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives), led by Gunter Pauli is bursting with ideas for viable “Blue Economy” businesses. 

This is not about social innovation and trying to do good. The goodness and efficiencies are baked in.

But there is a need for incubators and accelerators to help these news businesses root. Perhaps a Strong Angel 3-style event could help, bringing together people across disciplines, working on energy, construction, urban planning, transportation, manufacturing—united by a similarity of vision and approach. 

We need Media Lab-style, STEAM-filled, biomimicry-inspired genius solutions guided by the design metrics: small, modular, flexible, adaptable, scalable, interchangeable and cheap. Put some physicists, designers, writers and makers in a really nice room and mix. 

THE GOOD NEWS: NO SHORTAGE OF IDEAS and TOOLS

A couple of months ago, a post by Tim O’Reilly flashed by in a G+ newsfeeed about a Kickstarter project for a tabletop unit to produce microsolar. Nevermind that the feedstock issue still needs to be addressed…Wow! There are so many good ideas out there—if only fraction could be adopted as fast as the iPhone. Imagine microsolar panels as common as small batteries. Not only would it be good news for iPhones, but the less we need to collectively sip from the grid, the better. 

Another personal favorite is biochar, a modern riff on terra preta, that not only enhances soil fertility and water retention, but also absorbs atmospheric carbon. James Lovelock loves the stuff. 

Or imagine 3D printing technologies used to create replacement parts for New York’s sea water-eroded subway system; and designing cheaper, modular transport options. 

The waters are rising. The storms have gathered. If we are going to have a 21st century that isn’t all about recovery and salvage, then we need designers inspired by nature to help lead the way.

— J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

 RELATED: 

• Hot Topics: On Weather, Preppers and the Promise of a “Blue Economy” / J. A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews Dot to Dot

• Bouncing Onward: Climate, Consequences, Crops, Memes & Resilience / J. A. Ginsburg, TrackerNews Dot to Dot

• Gunter Pauli / TEDxFlanders

• Janine Benyus / Biomimicry 3.8 video page / (TED talks and more) 

• MIT Media Lab: Mediated Matter Group / website

• Revolution in Art & Design using 3D Printing | Objet for Neri Oxman 

Shelter from the (Super)Storm: Some Thoughts on Weather Gone Wild & Highlights from TEDxMidAtlantic 2012

BACKDROP

Monday: As I write this sitting safely at my kitchen table in Chicago, looking out on a sparkly sunny fall morning, a storm of truly epic proportions is churning unstoppably toward the East Coast. I know that in a matter of hours, cities will be be flooded, scarred and thoroughly beaten up. Infrastructure will float away. Building facades will be nicked and scoured by a barrage of miscellaneous flotsam-turned-missile, propelled by sustained winds 60 mph, or higher. Trees will topple. Cars will be flattened and drowned. And power grids will shred, leaving millions who can’t turn on a television without a “clicker,” or read a book without a “device,” scrambling to figure out how their parents survived in the olden days.

Roughing it with friends for a couple of days in New York is a grand adventure. But by day three, too many people sharing non-perishable meals gets old. Mountains of waterlogged garbage will pile up on sidewalks. Lives will peel back to bare essentials as the the value of valuables slot into lines on insurance claims. 

The preparations up and down the coast have been impressive: shuttered subways, boarded windows, stockpiled water, guzzled gasoline, evacuated neighborhoods, battalions of out-of-state electricians at the ready and ambulances lined up to ferry the sick and injured to higher ground. 

The lessons of Katrina and Irene have been well learned. This disaster will be mapped, clocked, photographed, video’ed and texted—a play-by-play media cacophony that will last as long as phone batteries hold out and cell towers stand. It will be tweeted and tumbled, facebooked and livestreamed.

But it won’t be stopped. It can’t be prevented. And it will expose the lie in “resilience,” the trendy concept du jour offering the seductive promise of “bouncing back.” Things don’t bounce back and never have. They bounce onward, weaving change into the mix. This is evolution writ small, large, biological, cultural, personal. 

The issue isn’t whether a city, building, economy, ecosystem or a human life can be restored, but rather how it can be rebuilt—reconstructed in ways better adapted to whatever’s changed.

In the case of “Superstorm Sandy,” man-mediated shifts in climate may very well prove to have been a key driver, but shifts in population have clearly also played a role: There are simply more people in harm’s way—50 to 60 million of them.

Factor in the connected nature of modern life and the ramifications go far beyond the impact zone. Just as floods in Thailand sent computer hard drive prices skyocketing last year, floods in Pakistan sent cotton prices soaring two years ago, and the US drought has sparked a continuing spiral of higher food prices, everything links and cascades. The effects of Sandy will be felt far and wide, in ways we can’t even imagine, for some time. 

Closer to my home, the storm is expected to move water from the northern end of Lake Michigan hundreds of miles to the shores of Chicago, prompting a flood watch for the next few days. No rain expected, but a flood threat, nonetheless. 

Clearly, we are dealing with forces bigger than all of us. 

Addendum/Tuesday: So far the winds haven’t been particularly rough here, but it is sobering to think they were part of something so catastrophically destructive. The morning-after photographs and video saturating the internet are heartbreaking. Water will be pumped, repairs made, schools reopened, but everything just got harder for a long time to come. New York’s vulnerability as a low-lying island in an era of rising sea-levels has been irreversibly exposed. Even without the unusual “Frankenstorm” combo of hurricane, nor’easter and high tide, as sea levels rise, it will take less to do the same kind of flooding damage. This is not a good place for a financial nerve center. It is not a safe place to live. 

Cooler weather will keep mold down on the massive collections of waterlogged and ruined stuff, but now legions of hardy subway rats are set to take to the streets, a sci-fi nightmare gone real. 

All along the Eastern seaboard, the reality of the new normal is settling in, even in places that dodged Sandy’s full wrath. The insurance companies that have been warning about climate change with increasing alacrity will ultimately deliver the bad news bill: swaths of coastline stamped uninsurable. 

I feel lucky to be back home, a thousand miles inland and 500 feet above sea level. But I love those coastal cites. Many friends are suffering. And, inevitably, what happens there will affect here. It may not be as fast as the winds whipping down Lake Michigan, pushing up 25 foot waves, but it is coming. 

•••••

During a lull between speakers at TEDxMidAtlantic, one of the organizers asked the audience for questions. “Will there be a TEDxPerfectStorm?” I shouted out. There is precedence: TEDxVolcano, TEDxOilSpill. Although the question was half-joking, maybe it is really a good idea. This is one of those quintessential “teachable moments.” It doesn’t make sense to repair a vulnerable grid, for example. How can existing distributed power technologies be scaled up to create something sturdier? What are the prospects and the  options for coastal cities, not just in the US, but around the world? What are the public health implications (bold rats are never good news…). How can cities become more self-reliant? 

_____________________________________________________________

TEDxMidAtlantic

It was against the specter of this growing threat—a buzz-saw weather bomb with DC then in the bull’s eye—that I spent a few days in Washington immersed in TEDxMidAtlantic. This is one of the larger TEDx’s—almost a mini-TED—bringing together nearly 1,000 people for dozens of talks spread over two days. 

A couple of years ago, I attended TEDxOilSpill (more disaster!), which had been organized by the same group, headed up by David Troy and Nate Mook. I knew it would be good. It was also an opportunity to use a few frequent flyer miles from a stash I’d built up on a now sadly bankrupt airline (thank you AA for the rebook on an earlier flight home—the customer rep was wonderful). 

There have been more than 5,000 TEDx’s—locally organized idea-fests—over the last few years. What began as a grassroots movement has not only gone global, but has enough of a track record to have developed production values. The staging, designed to motivate and inspire through video artistry, graphic panache, movie score-style music, famous quotes, empowering pledges and campaigns, can be pretty powerful. Alas, I have a curmudgeonous streak. There was charm in those rough edges.

No matter, the TED alchemy inevitably kicks in. Speakers—not all, but most—deliver the goods. I found myself riveted to my seat high up in the balcony, safely out of video range (so when I close my eyes either to listen more carefully, or, with some of the more perplexing speakers, doze, I won’t ruin a shot). 

For me, the TEDxMidAtlantic highlights broke down into three parts, two of which revolved around idea arcs, while the third focused on personal stories. It was a very full couple of days with more three dozen speakers. So consider this a sampler, with eight:  

PRIVACY / NETWORKS / MARKETING / POWER: Alessandro Acquisti, Alec Ross & Colin Powell

• One of the first to present was Alessandro Acquisti, an economist and associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies internet privacy—or, more to the point, the lack thereof. His experiments using algorithms designed to “guess” social security numbers have proven so disturbingly good, the US Social Security Administration changed the way numbers are now assigned. His team continues to push the scary envelope, most recently tying together Facebook profiles, face recognition software and social security numbers. 

The implications go well beyond Big Brother creepiness to the even creepier realm of marketing. This is the ultimate “filter bubble” where messages can be individually targeted with Minority Report-style specificity.

It is a a technology with the potential to reinforce and amplify trends in the name of catering to individual preferences.

Even without such fancy software, those with high Klout scores get more opportunities and freebies than those with low scores. The digitally rich are getting richer while the digitally poor poorer, and the middle class shrinks fast. 

Or—this goes beyond Acquisti’s research—imagine a “smart” billboard somewhere in the Middle East able to deliver one message to a person face-recognized as a Palestinian and another, very different message, to an Israeli. Elusive common ground could easily become that much more elusive. 

As collateral damage, serendipity suffers an algorithmic blow: It becomes more difficult to learn about things we don’t already know we might find interesting. 

•••••

• Alec Ross, Secretary of State Clinton’s “tech guru,” spoke eloquently about digital networks eroding and replacing political hierarchies. Twitter and Facebook made the Arab Spring possible, although, he noted, have not proved as effective in helping shape what’s next. They provide no Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King figure around which to rally, or clear framework upon which to build. 

Yet these broad populist networks may be vulnerable to a different kind of hierarchy, one that Ross may not yet have considered: a corporate hierarchy. Companies that can operate in the proprietary shadows can be difficult to regulate. In September, for example, Facebook unilaterally changed its algorithm, dramatically cutting the number of friends or followers that see any particular post. In an effort to drive ad sales, Facebook is no longer as good, or reliable, a network for many of its users as it once was. Whoever controls the algorithms can manipulate information delivery at will. The messenger can effectively kill the message. 

•••••

• General Colin Powell was a revelation. I had known him only through news clips: always serious, with brow furrowed and jaw set. Who knew he had such a ready smile, sense of humor, sense of mischief and a passion for early childhood education? “It is not where you start in life, it’s what you do with life that determines where you end up life,” he intoned, using his own story as the son of immigrants and a resolute “C” student as proof. “Choice, not chance, determines your destiny.”

The ROTC program at City College of New York proved Powell’s route to the American Dream. But would he have discovered it if he had been algorithmically slotted from childhood? The digital divide of the 21st century may not be about access to hardware—computers, tablets, smart phones—but rather access to the same information, opportunities and choices as the digitally blessed. 

••••••

CHILDHOOD, HEALTH & OPPORTUNITY: Colin Powell, Mark Hertling and Darrell Hammond 

• General Powell also spoke about the “gift of a good start”—the critical early years that cast the statistical die of a child’s future. A student who cannot read at level by third grade will very likely spend time in jail as an adult, he noted. So the best way to empty prisons, cut crime rates and lighten court case loads would be to invest in early childhood education programs. This goes beyond mastering ABC’s and 1,2,3’s to include teaching critical social and emotional skills. A child who can manage emotions, knows how to make friends, work cooperatively in a group and has the self-confidence to try and try again is easier to teach. Educators are more inclined to help youngsters who have these skills. (This is an issue particularly close to my heart—see Stuart J. Murphy’s I See I Learn). 

•••••

• Another military man, Lt. General Mark Hertling, Commanding General of the more than 40,000 US troops stationed in Europe, spoke to the same basic issue, but in terms of physical fitness. It turns out that three quarters of all civilians who want to join the army are rejected, most for being obese. And nearly two thirds of the 25% who make the cut fail the PE test that is given on the first day of basic training. 

This is not only a human tragedy, said Hertling, but also a huge national security risk. We have become a nation of pokey roly-polies, just like the people in WALL-E, who required a phalanx of robots to make their lives possible. Hertling’s efforts to turn the situation around with de-super-sized healthy foods and workouts have saved tens of millions of dollars in medical costs. But the army represents just 1% of the US population. 

The way things are going, two-thirds of America’s children will soon qualify as obese. Obesity will be the new normal: our future squandered on fast food. 

••••••

• Enter Darrell Hammond, CEO and founder of one of my favorite organizations, the magnificently named KaBOOM! They build playgrounds in inner city play “deserts” with cadres of community volunteers. Over the last 16 years, KaBOOM! has built over 2,000 playgrounds, with the help of more a million volunteers and $200 million in contributions. These playgrounds become little hubs of “virtuous circle” good, not only providing safe places for children to learn to play together and to exercise, but also to bring adults together to develop a genuine sense of community.

•••••

LIFE / DEATH / LOVE: Theo Colborn, Charity Tilleman-Dick, Amy Webb

• A leather chair was brought out for Theo Colborn, who at 85 is a thin slip of a woman, with a voice as gentle as the grandmother she is. Don’t be fooled. Should you get a letter from Dr. Colborn, it might very well keep you up nights, especially if it is the letter she read to us. Dr. Colborn, an expert on the effects of chemicals on fetal development, a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment” and professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Florida, is also the founder and president The Edocrine Disruption Exchange (another type of TEDX). Her letter, written to whomever wins the election next week, ties fossil fuel chemicals to a litany of health woes. It seems we are not just screwing up the climate and poisoning the planet, but poisoning ourselves—and every other living thing—as well. 

Hers is the talk I hope gets posted first. 

•••••

• Operatic soprano Charity Tilleman-Dick first took the stage to sing, then returned to tell a story of personal loss, catastrophic illness, a double-lung transplant, visions from a month spent in a coma, a return to life, a marriage of true love, performances around the world, then illness again and a remarkable second lung transplant, this one from a woman who also loved to sing. Eventually, Tilleman-Dick’s body will reject these lungs as well and there will be no third pair. Each breath is a gift, one that—along with all the other transplantable body parts—any of us might give one day as registered donors. 

The story was told so beautifully that the lines between joy and sorrow, happiness and pain, and life and death blurred into one glorious human experience. I was in tears. The audience was tears. We knew just how lucky we were to know her, and for the reminder of how precious and spectacular life can be. 

•••••

• And then there was Amy Webb, wickedly smart, wildly accomplished, a proponent of DIY algorithms and living proof why girls really, really need to hang in there during math class. When faced with a series of worst-case scenario online dating match-ups, she turned the tables on the system, analyzing the equation from both sides. First, she created a rather detailed list of qualities required in a romantic candidate, complete with weighted scores, then reviewed the profiles of the women on a dating site who attracted the most dates. She was disciplined and detailed… and it worked! Mazel tov, Amy! Her book, Data, A Love Story: How I Gamed Online Dating to Meet My Match, will be published at the end of January, 2013. 

— J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED: 

• TEDxMidAtlantic / Facebook page

On Imaginal Disks and Innovation: Business Lessons from the Science Pages

The poetry of metamorphosis is inescapable, even when pared down to the “just the facts ma’am” bare bones science. The transformation of chubby grubs into precision aerialists, or hungry caterpillars into nector-sipping butterflies and moths, or fish-ish tadpoles into operatic frogs is as matter-of-fact and breathtakingly wondrous as Cinderella’s pumpkin-turned-carriage and mice-turned-footman.

Surely there must be a wand involved. 

Metamorphosis, of course, is the original metaphor, and so mesmerizing and powerful that understanding the mechanics doesn’t seem to diminish the mystery. 

How does a caterpillar rearrange itself into a butterfly? What happens inside a chrysalis or cocoon?

First, the caterpillar digests itself, releasing enzymes to dissolve all of its tissues. If you were to cut open a cocoon or chrysalis at just the right time, caterpillar soup would ooze out. But the contents of the pupa are not entirely an amorphous mess. Certain highly organized groups of cells known as imaginal discs survive the digestive process. Before hatching, when a caterpillar is still developing inside its egg, it grows an imaginal disc for each of the adult body parts it will need as a mature butterfly or moth—discs for its eyes, for its wings, its legs and so on. In some species, these imaginal discs remain dormant throughout the caterpillar’s life; in other species, the discs begin to take the shape of adult body parts even before the caterpillar forms a chrysalis or cocoon. Some caterpillars walk around with tiny rudimentary wings tucked inside their bodies, though you would never know it by looking at them.

— Feris Jabr, Scientific Amerian

Imaginal disks. Imagine that. The metaphor goes even deeper. 

Now imagine this: Metamorphosis is closer to a rule rather than an exception of life on Earth: By some estimates, as many as 90% of all insects (which dominate in the species count) shape-shift. Add in a few vertebrates and the tally may be as high as 65% of all species. 

Scientists are still puzzling the “why” details, but one theory suggests that by seeking different food sources, youngsters and the adults are not competing for the same limited resources, so there is literally more food to go around. 

IMAGINAL INNOVATION 

I have been thinking a lot about imaginal disks and innovation over the last few weeks: the unseen latent potential to transform from one business to another—a service to a good, a good to a service, past as prologue. 

“Think different”—Apple’s famous tagline—turns out to be the rallying cry of all things imaginal. It would have taken a sharp eye to have seen 20 years ago the proto music / video / books service, the smart phone empire or the tablet revolution within a niche player computer company. Of course, those developments depended on improvements in web technologies and bandwidth—which, to stretch the analogy, are a kind of new food source. Those proto-businesses were there, waiting for the right moment, the right environment, to grow. 

TO BE(E) THIS, OR TO BE(E) THAT: more from the biomimic business beat

Genes, it turns out, are more of a rough template of possibility, rather than roll-of-the-die certainty, and that the dance of Nature versus Nurture is considerably more dynamic and subtle than previously thought. 

Honeybees are the ultimate “twins” study: all the workers in a hive are genetically identical. Yet some spend their lives serving the queen, while others flit among the flowers. If it is not written in the genetic code, what determines this division of labor?  

This is one of those sleeper stories snoozing in the “sci-tech” section, but one that really, truly is quite a big deal with ramifications that go on to the horizon. 

Think of genes like little light bulbs that can be toggled on or off. A gene exists within an environment and changes in that environment can determine whether it toggles on or off. This is called epigenetics, ”the study of heritable changes that occur without a change in the DNA sequence” (epi from the Greek word meaning “upon”). In  other words, outside factors can affect genetic expression.

These toggle on/toggle off states—and the traits that they program—can be inherited, which is petty amazing. Perhaps even more amazing, though, is that these states and traits can change within a single lifetime. 

…(A)nalysis of the worker bees’ DNA revealed that foragers had one pattern of chemical tags on their genes, while those that stayed home had another. When bees swapped one job for the other, their genetic tags changed accordingly. Scientists call these patterns epigenetic states, because they work on top of the normal genetic code.

The study is thought to be the first to show that reversible chemical markers on genes might drive different behaviours in a living creature.

—Ian Sample, The Guardian

From the itty bittiest of cellular micro, to the macro of planetary climate change, environment can determine destiny. 

Is your head spinning yet? 

BACK TO BUSINESS

For the last year, I have been following the tech startup scene in my hometown Chicago fairly closely. There are about a dozen businesses that I have found particularly compelling, not just for the needs they address (although SpotHero, every time I pay less for parking downtown, I am so darn happy…), but also for their “imaginal disks.” The businesses that will go the distance will be those able both to scale up, and also have the potential to scale out: to transform and grow into suites of new businesses. 

Whether it is a travel service with a Harry Potter-ish potential that can grow its business as its target clientele ages (Travel 720), or an academic publishing platform that opens the door for all kinds of new journals (Scholastica), or a children’s clothing business that is building valuable “network equity” as it expands (Moxie Jean), these businesses are rich with latent possibilities. 

Like the bees, they have all the genes. We’ll just have to wait and see what toggles on. 

— J. A. Ginsburg @TrackerNews

RELATED: 

• How Did Insect Metamorphosis Evolve? / Ferris Jabr / Scientific American

• Biomimcry Institute (website)

• Ghosts in Our Genes / Epigenetics excerpt / NOVA (video)

• Think Bigger / J.A. Ginsburg / TrackerNews Dot to Dot

• A Chicago Tale of Parking, Innovation, Bad Deals and Better Options / J. A. Ginsburg / TrackerNews Dot to Dot

• Publish, Perish & Disruptive Innovation: Scholastica’s Better Answer / J. A. Ginsburg / TrackerNews Dot to Dot

• Baby Clothes, Sharing, Paradigm Shifts & Collaborative Consumption (with addendum, 2/17/12 / updated 9/12) / J. A. Ginsburg / TrackerNews Dot to Dot

Life at 10x and Beyond: Lichens, a Liverwort, a Microscope and Me…

(from the archives: This article was originally posted in July, 2008 on an iWeb blog called Germtales. Germtales went into cyber-hybernation. iWeb gave up the ghost… - j.a.g.)

It was bound to happen. The only wonder was it hadn’t happened sooner. Someone finally sat me down in front of a microscope and said, “Look!”

It was a “British Soldier” (Cladonia cristatella), a wee little thing, like the lichen in the photo above, with a bright red “fruiting body” cap. Aided by the unabashedly nosy lens of a dissecting microscope, I could see into all its folds. I could study the texture of its improbably lurid top, which “real size” was smaller than the head of a pin. Armed with a thin probe—the club from hell under magnification, especially with my clumsy touch—I could peer into all its secrets. The next few hours were lost in Lilliputian delight.

While lichenologist Rich Hyerczyk… No, that doesn’t do him justice. While Rich Hyerczyk, a lichen connoisseur and teacher of the “Lichens All Around Us!” class at the Chicago Botanic Garden, patiently took us through the basics of key guide identification, I happily oohed and ahhed, content for the time being simply to see these things exist.

Foliose. Crustose. Fruticose. The general shape-based classifications were fairly straightforward (looks leafy, looks crusty, looks shrubby). After that, it was alien territory: new words for previously unimagined things.

Soredia. Thallus. Xanthomendoza. Physcia. Candellaria. Squamule. Apothecia. Podetia. I was a stranger in a strange land and pretty darn happy about it.

One of my favorite parts of travel is taking a walk alone as soon as I arrive somewhere new—before anyone has a chance to tell me where I am.

Within minutes of stashing bags at a hotel in Bologna, I am exploring the side streets off the main square, finding book stores (five in 30 minutes, including the magnificent Biblioteca Salaboursa—where I could have lived happily ever after), gelato shops, bakeries, one notably saucy fountain, a few tucked-away churches and some fabulous street theater.

In Havana (scouting a segment on the Old Havana neighborhood for a sadly never-produced National Geographic series on the “World’s Most Endangered Places”), I walk along El Malecon to see the sea. A honk from at least a block away jolts me from my shimmery thoughts: The driver of a 1950-something Buick with question-mark brakes warns me to safety.

LICHEN-LAND

Traveling to the land of lichens has been every micron as interesting and unexpected. Like many good journeys, this one began with a wrong turn and a touch of serendipity.

This past spring, groves of miniature and somewhat Seussian palm trees took over an old strawberry pot I use for moss roses. I put off planting for weeks, so adorable where their charms. Thinking they were lichens and wanting to know more, I signed up for the class.

Alas, my erstwhile lichen turned out to be liverwort—Marchantia polymorpha—but no matter. I was hooked on these strange little lichen plants and completely enthralled by their symbiotic society of fungi, algae and, every once in a while, cyanobacteria (microbes with a talent for photosynthesis).

A lichen doesn’t have parents so much as partners. An estimated 13,500 species of fungi seek out just a handful of algal species (and cyanobacteria) to capture and nurture in order to harvest the sugars they produce. In turn, the algae, now protected by fungal armor, are given the opportunity to travel, colonize and conquer the world. These odd-couples can make a go of it just about anywhere. There are lichens on rocks in the Arctic that live for hundreds and even thousands of years. In fact, crustose lichens—the ones that grow on rocks—are literally one with their rocks. The line between inorganic and organic is breathtakingly modest.

If you split a lichen’s fungus and algae apart, the fungus will die while the algae survives —provided there is enough water and conditions are right. It is basically the same story, writ larger, with humans and our commensal, “beneficial” microbes. Lose the gut bugs that help with digestion, produce Vitamin K, and, by their very presence, keep “bad” microbes at bay, and we’re toast. Microbes on skin, teeth, in vaginas and other surprising places play equally key roles. (Women on antibiotics are more vulnerable to yeast infections because the microbes that keep the yeast in check are gone.)

Birds, bees, alligators, cows, snakes and puppies — the animals need the microbes, but the microbes don’t necessarily need the animals.

It gets a little easier to accept the role as the “fungal half” when you start to see Life more as a series of social networks than tooth and claw competitions. Lynn Margolis (whose biology/geology-spanning career is itself as symbiotic as what she studies) and her son, Dorion Sagan, have written several books detailing the Nature’s propensity for partnerships. Symbiosis rules, right down to the cellular level and even into the genome (Symbiotic Planet, Acquiring Genomes).

IN THE FIELD (OR NEARBY…)

Most of the lichens around Chicago are on bark or wood, so we took a short field trip to a patch of forest on the Garden’s grounds. It took a while for the class to get beyond the parking lot. We spent half our time scanning the bark of a particularly lichen-friendly locust with our 10x loupes and magnifying glasses. Everywhere we looked—even on concrete curbs—we found thriving colonies of lichens.

It was a rainy morning, which puffed up the lichens’ algae, making colors more intense. We went through the key: Was a lichen foliose or crustose? (only one fruiticose that day). Was it easy to peel off the substrate surface? Was it greenish or yellow? What color was its underside? Did it have apothecia (cups full of spore-filled sacs) or soredia (fringes of fungal/algal cells ready to blow away and reproduce)? We identified 29 species in 3 hours. We learned that Anisomeridium polypori gives White oak its white bark. We even found a lichen, Phaeocalicium polyporaeum growing wiry black fringe on a “turkey tail” fungus (Trichaptum biforme). In the realm of the alien, this one stood out: Its fruiting body readily apparent, but the exact location of its body body still something of a mystery.

After class, I spent another hour and a half wandering the Garden alone, loupe in hand, kneeling over benches and cement walls, assuring my future as an eccentric. I marveled at “LBM’s” (little brown mushrooms) dotting a lichen-covered linden tree, noted the relative giant-ness of mosses, and followed the intrepid trekking of ants and spiders. The Garden was filled with dozens of species never mentioned on identification plaques. Everywhere I looked there was more. I was Horton. And boy was I hearing a whole bunch of Who’s.

•••••••••••••

The analogy turned out to be uncomfortably apt. Despite their ability to survive on the most forlorn surfaces in the harshest of climates, and despite their seeming irrepressibility, it turns out some lichens are, in fact, repressible. In the presence of sulphur dioxide and other man-made pollutants, some species pack it in and disappear, making lichens good, easy-to-monitor indicators of environmental health.

But it goes even deeper than that. Dozens of bird species, along with some small mammal species, seek out lichens to line nests and burrows, possibly as a defense against disease and parasites. There are hundreds of active compounds in lichens, some of which are antibiotic. Usnea, for example, is a staple of Chinese and homeopathic remedies. Then there are the reindeer that live on a diet of lichens. Kill the lichens and Santa will have to find alternate transportation.

PATIENCE AND POSSIBILITIES

Back in the lab on the last day of class, we were ready for the 100x microscopes - the ones designed to reveal the daintiest of details. I was given a note card onto which a few chips from a picnic table had been glued back in 1992. I carefully squirted a drop of water onto some unpromising round black bumps I was told were the fruiting bodies of Amadina (nee Buella puntata) and watched as they gelled up enough to tease off with a probe and place onto a microscope slide. Another drop of water, a slide cover and a firm press to break open the fruiting bodies and we were ready for a look-see. Amazingly, stunningly, gobsmacking miraculously there they were: 8 translucent spore sacs to a bunch, just as advertised.

My bench-mate managed to find an actual individual spore. It was perfect. Who knows whether it was viable, but it might have been. Sturdy cell walls. Distinct cell markings where they were supposed to be. Life goes on.

As I drove home that night with the windows rolled down, listening to cicadas and glancing at summer-sky stars, it seemed a given that life would be everywhere throughout the universe. Life on Mars? Lichens on Mars? I wouldn’t bet against them.

—J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED

• Lichens of North America (link-filled website / photographs)
• Lichen / Wikipedia article

Photo credit for Suessian Liverwort and the Lichen on Tree: J.A. Ginsburg / CC BY-NC-ND

Publish, Perish & Disruptive Innovation: Scholastica’s Better Answer

Disruptive innovation is fun—especially when the industry being disrupted is hopelessly lame. Few industries can match academic publishing on that score: (in)famously slow, pricey and capricious. Scholars, or their university departments, can pay thousands of dollars to submit a paper for review, then wait months, or longer, to find out whether it has been accepted, and then months, or longer, navigating the back and forth of peer review. When a paper finally is published, more often than not, it is sequestered behind a high subscription pay wall, inaccessible to those who might benefit most from the research. 

“Publish or perish”—the time-honored credo of academic upward mobility—has been turned out on its head. One could perish, or at least go broke, trying to publish. 

Thousands of scientists, including a trio of Fields medal-winning mathematicians, have staged a boycott of Reed Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers, citing intolerable greed and monopolistic practices. When the world’s top math geeks can’t make sense of the numbers, you know something’s really wrong 

Free open access journals such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) provide a publishing alternative, but the real game-changer may come from Chicago-based startup Scholastica, which provides a low cost, easy to use, fast and feature-rich publishing platform.

Setting up a journal is free. Scholastica’s revenues come primarily from submissions fees, which cost just $5 for a law review and $10 for an academic paper. Although the law review price is actually higher than average, the research paper fee is orders of magnitude cheaper. 

Peer review, the cornerstone of academic publishing, relies on reputational currency. Reviewers are unpaid scholars who take on the onerous task analyzing others’ research both out of professional interest and to increase professional stature.

Scholastic offers an advantage here as well. The web is brilliant for tracking reputational currency. From AirBnB and TripAdvisor to TaskRabbit and Facebook “likes,” we have become a culture that loves to share ratings. 

The nuts and bolts of putting together a first rate journal still require considerable effort, but with costly and time-consuming logistical hurdles removed from the equation, the focus can go back to the mission: documenting and sharing knowledge. 

Although journal publishers using the platform can charge subscriptions if they choose, the lower cost structure means they still out-compete traditional publishers on price. They can also have an ongoing publishing program, pushing out new articles all the time, rather than waiting for a set pub date. 

Together with online educational services such as Coursera, video tutorial pioneer Khan Academy, the Open Science movement, and the emergence of an open source textbook market, Scholastica is part of a tech-enabled trend that challenges the educational status quo. This goes beyond offering an alternative to expensive educations that fewer and fewer can afford. It is about better ways to teach, learn and share research. 

Still, the forces of academic inertia are among the strongest in the universe…

…The biggest obstacle is the role that these journals play in academia itself, and how important publishing in a specific journal can be when it comes to promotions, granting of tenure, research grants and other aspects of academic life. Even some researchers who support the Elsevier boycott have said they will continue to publish in its journals because they feel that they have to.

Until that structure changes, or until enough researchers and academics decide they don’t care about the system and start to publish their work freely, the current system is unlikely to disappear any time soon. But just like the rest of traditional media industry, it is looking shakier and less stable all the time.

— Mathew Ingram / GIGAOM

•••••••••

As a platform, Scholastica is neutral: One could create a journal about almost anything. The Journal of Makerspaces, for example. Or The Journal of Urban Farmers, or Tech Incubators, or Pets, or perhaps The Journal of Humanitarian Tech. Transparent reputational currency can be used determine value, making it easier for readers to sniff out bogus, politically slanted or corporate-sponsored research. 

Just stay clear of the shady practices of Nicholas Ivanovich Lobachevsky (which, it should be pointed out, would get one booted off the Scholastica site as a TOS violation) and you’ll be fine: 

RELATED:

• Team Scholastica bios (University of Chicago grads on a mission…) / website

• A talk with Rob Walsh: Will Scholastica disrupt academic publishing? / COGSCI

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

Biochar’med: A One Stop Shop to Improve Soil Fertility, Improve Water Absorption, Filter Water and Repair the Climate

Finally, an answer I can dig my hands into. It arrived wrapped in a canvas bag with the words BLACK REVOLUTION and an image of a hand making a peace sign stenciled in red. Inside, a plastic gallon ziploc containing a mix of compost, coir (shredded coconut husk) and biochar, the secret sauce of terra preta, the rich black earth that helped pre-Columbian cultures thrive in the otherwise nutrient-poor soils of the Amazonian jungle.

Ever since I first read about terra preta in a National Geographic article by Charles (1491) Mann, I have wanted some. And now here it is, an ancient tech that might just help save us all.

Although the ancients, who created it by burning plant wastes in low-oxygen environments such as buried pits, were interested only in creating more fertile soil, biochar is not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative, absorbing atmospheric CO2. In other words, it is exactly what we need lots of right now.

Unlike modern petrochemical fertilizers that must be applied each season to give a jolt of nutrition to crops (and, collaterally, to the algae blooming in “dead zones” downstream), biochar helps soils become more fertile by creating friendly habitat for microbes, starting a virtuous circle of soil-building that only gets better over time.

Writes Mann:

…Much as the green revolution dramatically improved the developing world’s crops, terra preta could unleash what the scientific journal Nature has called a “black revolution” across the broad arc of impoverished soil from Southeast Asia to Africa…

… Tropical soils quickly lose microbial richness when converted to agriculture. Charcoal seems to provide habitat for microbes—making a kind of artificial soil within the soil—partly because nutrients bind to the charcoal rather than being washed away. Tests by a U.S.-Brazilian team in 2006 found that terra preta had a far greater number and variety of microorganisms than typical tropical soils—it was literally more alive.

A black revolution might even help combat global warming. Agriculture accounts for more than one-eighth of humankind’s production of greenhouse gases. Heavily plowed soil releases carbon dioxide as it exposes once buried organic matter. Sombroek argued that creating terra preta around the world would use so much carbon-rich charcoal that it could more than offset the release of soil carbon into the atmosphere. According to William I. Woods, a geographer and soil scientist at the University of Kansas, charcoal-rich terra preta has 10 or 20 times more carbon than typical tropical soils, and the carbon can be buried much deeper down. Rough calculations show that “the amount of carbon we can put into the soil is staggering,” Woods says. Last year Cornell University soil scientist Johannes Lehmann estimated in Nature that simply converting residues from commercial forestry, fallow farm fields, and annual crops to charcoal could compensate for about a third of U.S. fossil-fuel emissions. Indeed, Lehmann and two colleagues have argued that humankind’s use of fossil fuels worldwide could be wholly offset by storing carbon in terra preta nova. (emphasis added)

—Our Good Earth / National Geographic

There’s more.

• Biochar can help plants weather moderate drought. It improve soil water absorption

• Biochar can replace activated carbon as a cheap, DIY, filter for polluted water sources.

And now, thanks to a small but sparky start up called re:char and a Kickstarter campaign, I have got a bag of this wonderful stuff. I can help my garden grow and help the planet, too—really, truly.

Of course, one bag won’t make much of a difference. But if were possible to scale up production through a global network of small manufacturers using local feedstocks, and if biochar were adopted at even a hundredth the rate of cell phones, the world might be a noticeably better place in the not so distant future. Pretty flowers, nice veggies and a climate under repair. Really, why wouldn’t we try this?

—J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED:

• International Biochar Initiative

• US Biochar Conference

• “The Carbon Negative Option: Why Tim Flannery and James Lovelock Love Biochar” / J.A. Ginsburg, / TrackerNews

Bouncing Onward: Climate, Consequences, Crops, Memes & Resilience

It is amazing what summer soaker can do. Three or four of such storms over the course of a few days can bring back the seemingly dead. For weeks I have given feeble garden hose life support to frying hosta lilies and parched grass, always making sure to water a spot near a robins’ nest so the parents would have a fighting chance of finding a few worms and grubs to feed their peeping young. Some days, the water in the hose would get so hot, I would spritz the sidewalks for few minutes to avoid scalding the already scorched.

Now it’s all green lawns, revived trees and perked up posies, reveling in gloriously normal temperatures that gently rise into mid-80s during the day and settle into the 60s for snugly cicada-serenaded sleep at night.

This is summer as it ought to be. Summer as it used to be, at least in my little sliver by Chicago. Yet even though the view out the window looks like the poster child of resilience, it is more a reminder that what was once reliably normal is fast becoming a rarity to be treasured.

Over 4,700 weather records have been broken in the US so far this year. The withered corn crop, once on track to be the largest in history will now be the largest loss in history. And with demand for all commodity crops increasing right along with global population, even little wiggles can amplify across world markets. The catastrophic floods in Pakistan a couple of years ago sent cotton prices soaring, even though Pakistan ranks a distant fourth as a supplier.

The Great American Corn Pop of 2012 is a much, much bigger deal and will translate into higher food prices, higher fuel prices (another ethanol promise broken), more hunger, more debt, more unrest and more misery in a cycle that will be tough to break.

The drought tipped the balance of a global food system already in a delicate state,   made vulnerable to petro chemical-dependent soils, fast-depleting aquifers, pesticide-impervious “superweeds,” an increasingly monopolistic agri-food supply chain, a resurgence of crop pests and rising fuel costs.

Extreme and unpredictable weather causes highways to buckle, concrete to crack, rail ties to kink, bridges to bend and rivers to become unnavigable. Even if you manage to grow a crop, there is still the challenge of getting it to market

A DANGEROUS MEME

How do you adapt to such a fast-moving target? Even if we were able turn off our collective car ignitions and switch instantly to renewable power sources, there are more than enough greenhouse gases swirling around the Earth’s atmosphere to cause mischief for decades to come. The disaster is so overwhelmingly obvious that now Koch-sponsored scientists have seen the grim light. Still, there are politicians who continue to bray for more mining and drilling.

In a tour de force numbers analysis in Rolling Stone magazine, Bill McKibben follows the money:

…We have five times as much oil and coal and gas on the books as climate scientists think is safe to burn. We’d have to keep 80 percent of those reserves locked away underground to avoid that fate. Before we knew those numbers, our fate had been likely. Now, barring some massive intervention, it seems certain.

Yes, this coal and gas and oil is still technically in the soil. But it’s already economically above ground – it’s figured into share prices, companies are borrowing money against it, nations are basing their budgets on the presumed returns from their patrimony. It explains why the big fossil-fuel companies have fought so hard to prevent the regulation of carbon dioxide – those reserves are their primary asset, the holding that gives their companies their value. It’s why they’ve worked so hard these past years to figure out how to unlock the oil in Canada’s tar sands, or how to drill miles beneath the sea, or how to frack the Appalachians.

—Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math

Sustainability, which implies a baseline stability—the very thing we are fast losing—is giving way to the meme of resilience: the idea that somehow we will be able to recover from the inevitable disaster looming and “bounce back.” It is the seductive promise of Dorothy waking up safe in her bed in Kansas, with Toto ready to resume his rightful place in her arms once more.

But the tornado that rocked Dorothy’s world is nothing compared to the tornadoes, direchoes, record monsoons, massive droughts and rapid ice melts rocking ours. Even the parched park lawn now showing signs of green grizzle isn’t bouncing back, but  evolving, bouncing onward. Weeds with better root systems are making the most of their competitive advantage. Unless someone rips up the sod and reseeds, that lawn has changed for good.

Resilience is also a neutral concept, a point that is often overlooked. What bounces onwards may not be to everyone’s liking, such as weeds, bunny rabbits, pathogens, drug cartels and oil companies.

So the question is not whether we can return to a comfortable status quo: We can’t. Rather it is Status quo vadis? Where are we going?

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED:

• Global Risks 2012 / World Economic Forum (pdf and additional web resources)

Hot Topics: On Weather, Preppers and the Promise of a “Blue Economy”

It was subtle at first. It stopped getting hotter. It was more comfortable outside at ten in the morning  than it had been eight. Winds began to blow life back into Lake Michigan’s tepid water, sending white-capped waves to shore. Sweaty air dried out. Colors returned. Thought was possible. 

What difference a few degrees and a good breeze can make. A few days ago, electrical transformers lit up the skies like giant Tiki torches here in Chicago. Power outed. Roadways buckled. A bridge collapsed. Tempers flared. Guns blazed. People died.

But the next few days stretch out like a National Geographic dream: highs in the low 80s and lows in the sleep-perfect 60s. That was just a patch of weird weather, right?

Maybe.

Probably not. 

The massive dome of hot air continues to incinerate much of the country, sucking the life out of everything—reservoirs, crops, lawns, savings, dreams—pushing ecosystems to the edge and people to the brink.

The heat magnifies every vulnerability, sparking epic wildfires measured in dozens of square miles, and triggering fast moving “direchos” that hurl hurricane force winds to the horizon and beyond. As drought-ravaged ranchers sell off cattle in record numbers, desperate auto dealers slash prices on hail-dimpled cars. But a cheap steak dinner and a pre-ding’ed ride seems like a pretty thin upside.

Where did all the water go? English streets. Russian resorts. Indian wildlife parks. Thai rice paddies and computer hard drive factories. Medieval Italian hill towns. Pretty much everywhere it’s not wanted, at least in such quantity.

The last few years have shattered records for shattering records. Indeed, there is an app just to keep track. Droughts, floods, snowmageddons, heat waves, cold snaps, ice melts. “Freak” has become the new normal. The climate has tipped. Just ask the insurance companies tallying the bills.

We are past the point where doing less bad is anywhere near good enough:

…(A) thief who steals less will always be considered a thief, whereas a company that reduces pollution by 80 percent is heralded as an environmental success.

Gunter Pauli, founder, ZERI and the Blue Economy 

We map, we monitor, we measure. Yet clever tech-driven insurance schemes to help farmers micro-navigate around wild weather still can’t stop it. This year’s record corn planting in the US is quickly withering into record losses, with global implications. Not even the most super duper of GMO seeds can hack it without rain. Likewise, given the options of Hot and Scorching, how smart does a thermostat—even a lusciously designed one—really need to be?

When the meta system of climate is knocked off its tracks, all bets are off. In news story after news story, reporters wander debris fields, filming neighborhoods of leveled homes, wrecked businesses and mangled towns, invariably comparing the scenes to a war zones. Well, they are. 

Resilience? There is no bouncing back, only onward.

• PREPPERS

If you can’t fix it, prepare for it. Survivalism has gone mainstream, the focus of a new  National Geographic reality series with perhaps the most dystopian title in TV history: Doomsday Preppers. NatGeo’s mission has apparently morphed from “inspiring people to care about the planet,” to teaching people how to hang on in the Mad Max era. So man up, whales. You’ll have to save yourselves…

Learn how to stir-fry crickets, dig a spiderhole, power a car on wood, forage for plant-based medicines and shoot the heck out of anybody who gets in the way! One unusually hopeful prepper has even amassed his own private seed bank with 11,000 seeds.

The companion website includes a special feature called “The Doomsday Dashboard”  that tracks social media trends of doom and gloom. It’s a bit like watching a car wreck, only on a planetary scale: You can’t help looking.

The Doomsday Preppers are ready for a variety of cataclysmic disasters that could mean the end of the world as we know it. But which end-of-the-world scenario are we all really worried about? Using Twitter, we are mining the chatter to see what is at the forefront of the public’s collective consciousness. Will it be a megaquake, economic collapse, global pandemic, a 2012 cataclysm, nuclear war, solar-flare-induced power failures, or an extreme oil crisis that leads to the unraveling of society? Check back to see what the masses are saying, and see which catastrophe is on top of the Doomsday Dashboard.

• OR…

For those of us who prefer not to dress in camouflage or dream of a future spent bartering for shelf stable sour cream (there really is such a thing), serial entrepreneur Gunter Pauli’s ideas for a “Blue Economy” offers some hope. For Pauli, founder of the Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives (ZERI), the answers are, zen-ishly, in the questions. Too much atmospheric CO2? That’s an opportunity! In what can CO2 be used as an input to create something useful that generates jobs and revenue?

Inputs and outputs, virtuous spirals, biosystems thinking and business: Nature doesn’t  waste anything, so why do we?

Ecosystems only work with what they have. … And so I started to criticize my own green economy of which I was a part. I realized that green energy depends on subsidies and those organic products cost more money. And that means if we were ever to succeed, it was going to be for the rich and the few and not for everyone on this earth…

So I imagined the Blue Economy. An economy where we innovate, where we generate more cash flow, where we have more jobs, where we build up social capital and where we deliberately do everything we can to stimulate entrepreneurship.

(Gunter Pauli TEDxFlanders lecture)

Pauli cut his entrepreneurial teeth over twenty years ago with Ecover, a Belgium-based pioneer in biodegradable detergents, but learned—the hard way—that eco-friendliness was really a big picture supply chain issue. Although palm oil biodegraded like an eco-champ, palm oil plantations degraded Indonesian biodiversity. What was good for the rivers of Europe was nailing rainforests and the orangutans who lived there.

These days Pauli looks to the always reliable laws of physics and biomimicry for better answers. He touts the virtues of a cell phone powered by body heat, sound waves and microwind, a filterless water system with vortex-enabled purification, a building that uses a termite-mound inspired design for air exchange and thermal regulation—no AC required. Dozens of ideas are listed on The Blue Economy website.

So what kind of innovations do I want? I want innovations that eliminate the symbols of unsustainable production and consumption, like the 300 billion bottles of Coke we’re going to throw away. Like the 100 tons of titanium from our razors that we’re going to throw into landfills. Like the 40 billion batteries we’re going to do away with, without recycling.

Like the cup of coffee you’re drinking.

…You are only consuming 0.2% of what the farmer produced. 99.8% is wasted and generates methane gas. You never associated coffee drinking with climate change. And what about the shitake mushrooms for all you vegetarians who want to save the animals, but are responsible for the logging of oak trees in China?  We don’t make the connections. We don’t see how the business evolves.

For Pauli, smart businesses dovetail income streams.

We need to imagine businesses that generate multiple cash flows—where the waste from the coffee bean is used to grow the shitake mushroom. And thanks to the caffeine, the shitake will grow three times faster. And with the waste from the shitake, feed the pigs. I have three cash flows. And on top of that I am converting methane gas into CO2, which means I even have a CDM, a Clean Development Mechanism Project on my hands. Four cash flows. We’re in business.

Heeding the lesson of Ecover’s early missteps, Pauli keeps a big picture perspective. Organic cotton, for example, cuts out pesticides, but still drinks up vast amounts of water. The eco-issue is cotton itself:

…Time has come to explore the abundant local resources, and hemp is a first obvious option. Hemp and kenaf along with flax produce quality fibers that last, grow prolific on poor soil and have an appetite for water which is only a fraction of the thirst displayed by cotton. While the processing of hemp, kenaf and flax is still dependent on water, the overall performance is a multiple better. Time has come to create a portfolio of solutions.

Gunter Pauli (“Better Than Organic”)

It turns out we really can have it all because we actually do have it all already. But we have to quit sabotaging ourselves by poisoning the planet, making less from more and finessing outmoded ideas. Business as usual got us into this climate mess. Business smarter than usual might just help us survive it.

— J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

RELATED

• It Takes a Banker: Ecosystem Economics, Climate Change & the Poor / J.A. Ginsburg

• Insurance Companies Face Increased Risks from Warming / Ben Schiller / Yale Environment 360

• World Economic Forum: Global Risks 2012

• Surrounded by Solutions from Nature, Gunter Pauli, Forbes India

The Good, the Bad and the Myopic: What Nora Ephron has to do with Techweek

Techweek 2012 is a wrap. Despite some organizational stumbles, the sheer mass of programming and the crowds guaranteed good things would come of it. They certainly did for me.

Techweek ran the gamut, from Howard Tullman’s tour-de-force talk on the data-sliced present/future, full of utopian potential and dystopian risk, to Dennis Manarchy’s stunning oversize Vanishing Cultures portraits, an homage to the present/past of both people and technology. It was wonderful to meet and reconnect with people, to talk about projects, business models, progress. And god bless those ever-resourceful Task Rabbits who brought the Wow Bao buns: brilliant marketing—really, truly I will use you when the need next arises.

Yet throughout the event, there were little off-notes of sexism, most likely unintentional, but nonetheless there.

• Only 7 women on the Techweek 100 list
• An all male panel of judges for the 2012 Final Five Launch competition
• Only one woman entrepreneur in the Final Five pitch

Which is neither to say that there are not a lot of talented men on the Chicago tech scene, or that all of the men on the list didn’t deserve to be there. Rather, it is point out that the number of talented women on the scene is on the rise. And though plaid and t-shirted men still outnumbered women strolling the trade show aisles and attending lectures, I would guesstimate that at least a quarter of attendees were women. 

There are more women enrolling in Code Academy. Three of what I think are among the most promising startups in Chicago happen to be women-run:

• Sharon Schneider, Good Karma Clothing for Children
• Julie Bashkin, KLUTCHclub
• Jennifer Thomas, Travel720

This is something to celebrate. Yet when numbers skew so badly—only 7% of the techs-to-know in Chicago are women? really?—it raises questions.

I probably would have let this slide, but for a quote of Nora Ephron’s that I read this morning in an obituary. In a graduation address to her alma mater, Wellesley College, she talks, with her trademark razor sharp wit, about changes in attitudes toward women and by women since was a student in the early 1960s. Then she gets to the rather serious nut:

“What I’m saying is, don’t delude yourself that the powerful cultural values that wrecked the lives of so many of my classmates have vanished from the earth. Don’t let the New York Times article about the brilliant success of Wellesley graduates in the business world fool you — there’s still a glass ceiling. Don’t let the number of women in the work force trick you — there are still lots of magazines devoted almost exclusively to making perfect casseroles and turning various things into tents.

Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you — whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.”

So it makes a difference. There are good things happening on Chicago’s women-in-tech front. More good things need to happen. And we all need to do a better job both seeing and acknowledging them.

—J.A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews

(originally posted on Built in Chicago)

And now for something a little different…

“I See I Learn” is a new series of children’s books by my friend / colleague, Stuart J. Murphy. Just for fun, I created a little “webdoc,” promoting his publisher, Charlesbridge’s, booth at the American Library Association conference, which is just getting underway in Anaheim. Webdocs are free one-off, one page websites that offer drag’n’drop, wysiwyg formatting ease. I even embedded a YouTube video, resizing it by simply dragging a “handle” at the corner of the video to make it smaller. The graphics at the bottom of the post are links to articles.

And good gracious! I can embed a webdoc in a tumblr! Then I can “Bolt” the tumblr, then pin the Bolt on Pinterest. Then Tweet the Pinterest pin… Lather, rinse, repeat.

Cyber wormhole? Social media brilliance? The dizzying din of digital chatter echoes forever…

— J. A. Ginsburg / @TrackerNews