A Blue Economy Proposal

Efforts associated with the Blue Economy seem to have achieved some breakthroughs:

1. Marketing and communications (as with the case of the video and PR explaining the effort) that reflects the core messaging of ZERI about sustainability and how it needs to be economically viable without subsidies or just expecting people to do the right thing but pay more to do it.

2. A compelling web presence (www.blueeconomy.de). I see it as a major success in terms of getting the many innovations he has talked about over these years translated into actual case studies or briefs that people can study on the web as part of a systematic approach.

3. Offer real solutions when criticizing existing approaches such as nuclear and conventional fuels as part of a more holistic understanding of reality.

Pauli a Leader in Emphasizing the need for more Synergistic Approaches within the Economy

What makes Pauli unique to me - among a growing crowd of global green visionaries and spokespeople - has been his way of explaining the changes and in that it is not enough to be "green" but rather to invest in a seamless way of living and being that is in harmony with the world around us. What I would add especially in relation to item #1 is is that through this idea of understanding nature or how it works we become more clear in seeing the need for practical holistic design models that create synergy within systems as has been demonstrated for example by George Chan's prototyping of Integrated Farming Systems. Chan's approach to explaining his work as simple and basic as it was, focused on the practice of community or rural scaled integrated farming. It really illustrated a key archotype or hologram for developing systems of synergy within industry, product and building design, development and agribusiness are the key leverage points for building a sustainable economy.

The new and emerging business model permits us to imagine how to exit nuclear - with minimal effort - in Germany thanks to breakthrough innovations that use available resources. 

Pauli saw an opportunity with the recent crisis in Japan with regards to the aftermath of Nuclear accident and Tsunami that preceded it to present these solutions to Japanese leaders in Tokyo in May of this year as a way to get around the current bind they face in relation to a major power crunch after shutting its entire nuclear power plant fleet.

This is encouraging to me as someone interested in ZERI's work and also concerned about the situation in Japan and the investment in Nuclear and the other "dirty technologies" that sustain our global economy. Pauli offers a integrated collection of novel, innovative, inspirational and holistic technologies and approaches that offer the opportunity for countless businesses. What we could see emerging is a global consortium or a partnership as part of a larger global plan to develop a global venture based on those three key elements.

A US Strategy for the Blue Economy?

When we look at the USA it can be discouraging. Indeed the USA which was once a leader in environmental reform has now become a laggard. Many of the key benchmarks for green investment and progress towards real sustainable development are not being met in the USA. It is good to understand why and how can the bottlenecks be overcome. The US President still wavers in terms of a clear, decisive and comprehensive strategy for the transition of the US economy towards a more sustainable trajectory. 

Today Obama endorsed a new effort to increase conventional fuels production in the US. While it is understandable that he should compromise under the current US regime in which the conventional US business leaders how sway on the national consciousness and bounds of the discussion, we cannot deny the reality of the scientific community. Recent reports by the IPCC indicate that the World can make a real shift with minimal impact on GDP (within a few decades we can provide 4/5s of our energy needs with an annual investment of 1 percent of global GDP). That might be a very wise investment esp given the high potential costs of a worst case Global Climate Change scenario but it needs to be carefully explained to the American public in order to succeed as part of a comprehensive approach - something along the lines of what you appear to be proposing in the companion press release to the Video on the need for alternatives to nuclear.

In terms of the US in particular there is a need for such an approach. While much can be done at the national political level such as convincing4 the president that he does not have to buckle under the Republican status quo and fascination with drilling more for oil and also shale fracturing to recover natural gas as way to address this concern about being depend on foreign oil. The American power elites have really demonstrated their incompetency on this issue as they have been making it a goal to reverse trends of reliance on foreign and Arab oil in particular for nearly 40 years now with no sign of success yet. 

What we need:

1. A real commitment to a practical solution that moves beyond oil

2. A campaign to end subsidies and research on fossil fuels and nuclear

3. A large scale public/private investment scheme that incubates distributed power solutions as test beds for these technology deployments you are talking about.

4. Assembling the networks to rapidly enable the large scale, global scale out not just of these technologies, skills and approaches but also most important the basic holographic model for replication at the community level.

The Problematique

Club of Rome has what it calls the Problematique - its EuroSpeak for understanding the holistic root of a problem before attempting to solve it with significant socioeconomic resources. Pauli mentions Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker who is founder of Wuppertal Institute. Wuppertal worked with USA's Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) (Amory Lovins) on the powerful and compelling Factor 10x research asserting that we had to reduce consumption up to 90 percent of what we now consume to be sustainable. So its not just about inspirational technologies, its about about a fundamental rethink of how we operate the economy and encourage people to live out their lives as consumers.

The Barefoot Inventor

The Problematique can only be solved though, through the development of compelling and inspiration solutions to this fundamental problem of the human condition - via technologies and their deployment at the human scale grass roots level. All over the world networks of tinkerers are emerging and becoming experts in gasification, biogas, solar, sustainable farming, etc, learning by doing and sharing with others their mistakes as well as their breakthroughs. I think these groups are the real question mark in terms of people knowing how to cultivate and support their work as we make the transition to the Blue Economy.

Rick Nelson has been tinkering with SolaRoof for over 20 years now and is currently launching his first prototype in the USA. SolaRoof is a system of insulating a greenhouse using soap bubbles. These industrial scale soap bubbles are created using industrial scale bubble making machines that fill a cavity space within the greenhouse between the outside and the inside of the greenhouse.

Some of these efforts are becoming sophisticated in terms of actually reflecting a way to do business and share ideas/IP in a more authentic and transparent way. All Power Labs has an innovative Open Source Approach to Gasification that includes a wiki, community discussion board, and a paypal ecommerce page that gives purchasers options to purchase gasification systems in various states of completion.

I have seriously considered buying the base gasification system because to me the idea of being able to produce wood gas or syn gas through a small system is a powerful statement towards my being part of the "Blue Economy." I think this is not just me, and reflects my sense and observation that people need to feel themselves as part of emerging sustainable systems. So what is missing I think in the environmental, green and progressive movements are opportunities by which people can become involved in such efforts to be the change and in the process, become more technically aware as to the nuts and bolts of green tech. 

In NM, Ampersand Sustainable Learning conducts workshops on sustainability and appropriate technology. How might the Blue Economy address these efforts or call for the support of such efforts to promote more enlightened economic development models?

The good news is that people in the non-affluent nations are starting to grasp sustainable and appropriate tech ontheir own terms and relation to their own cultural and social bakgrounds. Jegede Biodun is a pioneer of biogas development in Nigeria.

There is a lot I am not sure about in terms of the future, but what I am confident of is people are going to become more savvy and aware in terms of how their systems in their built environments sustain and produce their modern conveniences. Of course we wont all become machinists, farmers and builders but the importance of such skills in building an innovative blue economy from the ground up should not be understated. In other words we need a better complementarity between the blue and white collar jobs - possibly what they term "Green Collar Jobs" is naturally a movement away from what I see as a false dichotomy of the modernization process.

Ecovillages and Appropriate Technology

The Ecovillage model is still relevant. This was what brought me to Arcosanti and its vital for the sustainable redevelopment of global human civilization. People need to see, touch, taste and feel sustainability as working, economically viable and holistic models for what are now innovations away from the conventional economy. And the aspect of people actually living next to the green (or should I say "blue") infrastructure is important to because if you are to embrace holistic thinking you have to reduce the gap between our work, living space and leisure which of course exponentially increased through the subsidization of suburban sprawl particularly in the USA.

Key to the world wide application of these ideas is the development of a acceleration of the dissemination of current best practices. This might include the creation of a global network of innovation centers in which the key values of the green movement would be ingrained in the students participating in this entrepreneurship program. While a Christian school in the USA is one model for such a program in the USA where students work to pay for their tuition (School of the Ozarks), there are not many expamples where such programs are being applied to the dissimenation of green technologies.

A Vision of a Reformulating Arcosanti 

Inspired by Paolo Soleri's work in creating Arcosanti, but turned off by his increasing fixation on large scale, monolithic models I still see something relevant to the core idea of Arcology. What I see before any larger scale urban city models are deployed is really to learn how to do what we do now at the level of 60 people much better at Arcosanti. Human scale considerations important in relation to the density and sizing of a project. Another important consideration to larger scale models is to test out their success at a smaller prototype scale because you need to be able to achieve a certain level of success at the immediate level before you propose more ambitious projects.

So fitting with Soleri’s idea of Reformulation would include a base human population living and working close to the production, research and office facilities of the Sustainable Business Incubation Center. This would also include consideration of cultural events and also outreach services such as convention center for green conferences with a complete set of services for the greening of conference events.

Students would learn about social/green entrepreneurship in the following areas:

1. Hands on learning in select fields of interest - students would be encouraged to develop their own matrix of interests and then do research and applied learning to develop a rich tapestry of experiences during their studies which will help in the application of their knowledge and innovation skills to the field.

2. Team/Community Building and Collective IQ - what we are learning is that collective IQ is very important to the success of our networks. What this means is that how we work together is as important (or more important) as defining ourselves as excelling in competitive skills. Emotional IQ and learning how to adapt to challenges through persuasion is more important that our ability to perform IQ tests or our mastery raw data and information/statistics on tests and quizzes.

3. Holistic Thinking - Think like an ecosystem as John Todd says so that we can optimize built environments and production systems to harness waste flows and transform them into resource flows.

The center would be designed to focus on core technologies of sustainable and appropriate tech and do research on minimizing the ecofootprint of the community and economy sustaining that community, while developing economically viable models that could be scaled out and applied elsewhere in other regions of the world. So it would be a truly global approach in which participants would share and leverage regional and national advantages of their respective regions to help in building the collective IQ of the consortium at the global level and addressing weaknesses and building capacity in other regions from their successes.