Improv: To make do with whatever materials are at hand.

This blog tips its hat to Buckminster Fuller and his “Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth”.

Buckminster Fuller talks about the Great Pirates.  From wiki:  “The source of their power is that they are the only masters of global information in a time where people are focused locally. Specifically, the Great Pirates (G.P.’s) are aware that resources are not evenly distributed around the world, so that items which are abundant in one area are scarce in another. This gives rise to trade which the G.P.’s exploit for their own advantage.”  So as the 99% speak around the world, and the current political climate of our leaders rings out “No and No”, I suggest we let the current paradigm huff and puff itself to exhaustion and focus our energies on charting a path to improvise on our current system and build a new one.

Improv works by saying “Yes, and…”

My favorite definition of Improvisation is : To make do with whatever materials are at hand.

I like this definition, bc it has a distinct sense of a finite set of conditions.  There is a base, a trumpet, and a piano. There is a comedian, an audience, a theme, and a moment in history.  There are acquired skills, honed intuition, resources, memories, experiences, feedback loops, desires, wants, needs.  Improv is definitely informed by past events, but it is very much motivated by current context. It is extemporaneous.  It is immediate.  What I love about improv, is that it is constantly pushing the edges of innovation.  It is the generative outcome of play.

I’ve been culling rules of improv from the web that I like.  I appropriated them from all kinds of authors in all kinds of fields to act as conceptual guidelines to define for ourselves Sustainable Systems by group play.

10 Rules for Innovation Improv:
1) Say Yes.

2) Say Yes, and..

3) Be Specific, Provide details. Offer up changes. Share. Contribute. Add one idea per line.

4) Don’t Ask Questions, Posit solutions.

5) Don’t Block or Deny. That’s a Know-No.

6) Pay Attention, Read, Listen, Watch

7) Build. Bring anything from anywhere. You look good if you set the frame for another good idea. Don’t feel self-conscious, your idea is an inspired stepping stone to an improved or divergent pathway.

Flat world -> Round world -> Finite world w 7 Billion people

Throughout history, we have come upon ideas that are difficult to integrate.  It’s normal.  Think of when we thought the earth was the center of the Universe.  It was a completely reasonable idea based on our immediate senses.  Or that the world was flat – also a reasonable hypothesis.  Or that the world ended at some edge of some ocean – just bottomed out like the edge of our bed!  Or that the earth was round, a very reasonable hypothesis.  Following this hypothesis, explorers from the flat world were rewarded with gigantic landmasses of unmined natural resources – ‘the new world’.  So while we don’t have to worry about sailing off the face of the earth at some unknown (but infinitely far) edge, we now have to worry about its finite surface area.  The possibilities implicit in finding the new world, also defined some basic physical limits.

And like our predecessors who tried to integrate sensory perception w abstract thought to conceptualize a round earth when for all intents and purposes it was flat, I recognize it is difficult to think about a finite earth when I can buy asparagus in NYC for $2/lb in October.

As a biologist, I often struggle w economic structure (asparagus in October for $2/lb, really?!); economists (generally) think of material resources as just subservient materials to the agency of humans rather than being the very intimate and mineral cycling of what we call humanity.  But Herman Daly is an economist I actually like.  In his “Beyond Growth”, he sees the disgruntled logic when an infinite economic growth paradigm is placed in the context of the Laws of Thermodynamics.  I’m going to quote at length from the first chapter of his book that set up the notion of a steady state economy:

“The growth advocates are left w one basic argument:  resource and environmental limits have not halted growth in the past and therefore will not do so in the future…

Earl Cook offered some insightful criticism of this faith in limitless ingenuity in one of his last articles (1982).  The appeal of the limitless ingenuity argument, he contended, lies not in the scientific grounding of its premises nor the cogency of its logic, but rather in the fact that:

‘the concepts of limits to growth threatens vested interests and power structures; even worse, it threatens value structures in which lives have been invested… Abandonment of belief in perpetual motion was a major step toward recognition of the the true human condition.  It is significant that “mainstream” economists never abandoned that belief and do not accept the relevance to the economic process of the Second Law of Thermodynamics; their position as high priest of the market economy would become untenable did they do so.’

Indeed it would.  Therefore, much ingenuity is devoted to ‘proving’ that ingenuity is unlimited.  Julian Simon, George Gilder, Herman Kahn, and Ronald Reagan trumpeted this theme above all others.  Every technical accomplishment, no matter how ultimately insignificant, is celebrated as one more victory in an infinite series of future victories of technology over nature.  The Greeks called this hubris. “

Daly ends this section by quoting from Cook again “without the enormous amount of work done by nature in concentrating flows of energy and stocks of resources, human ingenuity would be onanistic.  What does it matter that human ingenuity may be limitless, when matter and energy are governed by other rules than is information (Cook, 1982, p194).

So as we enter this magnificent period of the internet of ideas on a materially finite world, I am reminded of a book I read by Barbara Novak titled “Nature and Culture; American Landscape and Painting”.

America has become wealthy for many reasons.  In my mind, entering a pristine landscape and discovering oil catapulted the American dream for the various ex-patriots that arrived in ‘the new world’.  But that dream was predicated on growth by increased access to unspoiled resources.  America was rich in natural resources.  So incredible economic growth was totally possible (in that context).  What I like about Barbara Novak’s book, is that she notes the transition of styles of landscape paintings of the 1800s that I think reflect an important transition in thinking about nature.  There developed a tension between the pristine quality of the untouched land and the opportunity for mobilizing unexploited material wealth.  Artists went on dangerous expeditions to capture and record the virgin landscape and then they documented the transformation of that virgin landscape.  Landscape images ranged from untamed wilds of nature, to wilderness mysteries, to gardens of eden, to utilitarian topographic maps,  to pastoral narratives, to pre-industrial documentation.  What kind of landscape paintings do we have today?

In the 1800s, people on a crammed and overpopulated European continent, moved to an underpopulated and materially rich continent.  Growth! Unless we get to the moon and can grow our carrots there, there is no place to expand this growth paradigm as we currently understand it.  Given that I accept I live on a finite round earth, receiving a finite amount of sunlight daily, yet thriving on a trust fund of fossil energy, striving for a sustainable world is a real concept – an hypothesis that seems worthy of serious thought and meaningful exploration – not to be reduced to cynicism about how people appropriate the word ‘sustainable’.

We are not the center of the universe.  We do not live on a flat planet.  We live on a finite planet.  And on Halloween 2011,  world population is projected to hit 7 billion, each of us with varied demands on this finite surface, but 7 billion, none-the-less.  Trick or Treat.

How many calories to produce a 1-calorie can of coke?

As a child, I had an older couple next door that acted as adopted Grandparents, Helen and Jim.  Helen and Jim let me play on their piano, watch Sesame Street on their TV, took me to my first ballet, and treated me to my first Chinese meal where I was charmed by the red walls, the velvet curtains, the gold filigree, the pink sauce, the chopstick mayham, and of course the animal calendar.

Jim was a minister, varnished trash cans w charming images he cut out from magazines, and had a sweet sense of humor.  He used to ask me questions like:  if Ivory soap is 99.44% pure, what is the remaining 0.56%?  One time, at the Chinese buffet, when the waitress asked him for his drink order, he said:  I’d like something w no calories, no artificial coloring, no artificial flavoring, and no caffeine – Can you do that for me?  The waitress looked at him quizzically.  He meant he wanted a glass of tap water.

In 2003, I was in the position of hiring some undergraduates to work on a life-cycle analysis project with me.  By that time, I had become obsessed with where things came from and where they went.  Think about it, choose one thing on your table and try to follow all the steps back in its creation?  A pencil, for example.  Think of the package it came in.  The receipt you got at the register and the metals that made the register.  And what about the electricity in the shop, and the mining of the coal to light and cool the store.  What did the clerk eat for breakfast that morning – Where were the eggs laid and what was the egg carton made from.  What about the tractor trailer that brought the pencils to the store? and the tires that wore down on the highway getting pencils, in general, across America.  When the truckdriver stopped to load up w diesel, what bag of chips did he pick up and where was the phosphorus mined that fed the corn (or potatoes) that made those chips?  As you can see, I haven’t even gotten to the construction of the graphite, the harvest of the tree, the paint for the surface, the processing of the tin that holds the eraser, or the material basis of the eraser.

Now take that simple pencil example and extrapolate all the human cooperation and natural resources to bring you all the things on your desk.  It’s mind boggling.  Walk outside and take in all the things you don’t own, or that we as a society own collectively.  And for me, it fills me w tremendous gratitude.  Gratitude for all those that worked together and also gratitude for the land base that generated it.  It also gives me anxiety, bc I know there is inequity, injustice, and a limit to our natural resource base.

So, here I am interviewing smart Cornell undergraduates.  Yes we asked normal questions, but the question I wanted to know How they answered was this:  How many calories does it take to produce a can of 1-calorie Coke (and why). The choices were:  1-500 calories, 500-1500 calories, or >1500 calories.

I wanted to see the range with which the students thought.

The key word in the sentence is actually ‘can’.  Making an aluminum can from bauxite uses tremendous amounts of energy.  Some reports say 1600 calories for just the can alone.  Say nothing of the shipping, advertising, processing of the water, the carbonation, the creation of color, synthesis of caffeine and taste, etc.

The conceptual point here is simply that our lives are based on calories.  Calories we eat, and calories we don’t eat.  The pragmatic import here is, if you are only going to recycle one thing, let it be your aluminum!  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_recycling.  A recycled aluminum can uses 5% of the energy a brand new can uses (making this life cycle analysis more complicated).

Those points aside, what is sustainable packaging? and what exactly is the logic of a 1-calorie coke?  From an energy use standpoint (the 1969 slogan “It’s the real thing” aside), what organism would use more than 1500 calories to make a 1-calorie beverage that an individual pays a dollar for?  A 1-calorie can of Coke burns the fat of the land.   It might be my definition of futility.