Let’s fight climate change with a list of do’s and don’ts...

I am never quite sure what to make of the issue of climate change. It always seems to be there, nagging me and making me feel guilty when I throw away a piece of cardboard or leave the TV on standby, but in my opinion the whole subject of ecological change has become fairly stale.

The initial panic and realisation of what is happening has now been replaced with a ‘What else is on?’ attitude. Is this cultural ignorance or ill education? We are asked to do our bit to help ‘save the planet’ with generic lists of what we should and shouldn’t be doing: drive less, recycle more, plant a tree, but how do I know that this is going to have any effect on global warming? I know very little when it comes to science.

It is interesting to question whether we would be more willing to ‘do our bit’ if our ‘bit’ was tailored specifically to us as individuals. As Roger Malina states, ‘data about ones own environment must be accessible and understandable and in a sense ‘owned’ by each person.’ Would a location based, demographic eco database, informing us what we can personally do to combat global warming be the answer? Perhaps. Or perhaps we’ll just bury our heads in the sand for a little bit longer.

Now let’s all go plant a tree and feel better about ourselves.

Help the consumer!

I recycle as much I can, I use reusable bags, I print on both sides of a paper and that makes sleep well at nights. But is that what recycling is all about?

Hawkins presents recycling as a source of ethical self-improvement and I have come to agree with her. What recycling does is not solving a problem but putting patches on it. It gives the satisfaction to the consumer that everything is fine with buying and using something, as long as at the end he/she will throw it in the right bag. After that someone else we will take care of it and everything will balance. I get that satisfaction too but after some thought I feel like it does not really make a difference. I will put my plastic coffee cup in the recycling bin and it will be recycled but there will be hundred more plastic cups produced by the time I will have finished my action and probably not made of recycled material. “What recycling did was shift the focus of environmentalism from industry and production to households and consumption” (Hawkins, 2005:104)

As Colin Williams1, says in an article in Icon magazine “recycling has only captured the public imagination because it’s relatively easy to do, but it’s just a process of “waste diversion”, and the system only comes full circle when someone buys a recycled product”. What the article suggests? Use more oil. I believe that is where a potential and real solution of the problem lies. As future designers instead of having recycling on the top of our design requirements we should probably go for bigger life cycle. Market is full of all these incredibly cheap products in chains like Argos and Ikea but with one or two years of life using the excuse of recycling. Creating products that can be used longer would reduce the waste production, as the consumer would not have to buy new ones every one or two years. That would also move environmentalism back to production.

I am not suggesting removing the responsibility from the consumer, but sharing it with him. Help him/her to waste less.

1 Collin Williams is founder of Smile Plastics, a recycled plastic manufacturer.



"Argos value range white cordless kettle", price 4.79 GBP, life 1-2 years
http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/4219639/Trail/searchtext%3EKETTLE.htm



Hawkins, Gay. (2005) "Plastic Bags: Living with Rubbish". International Journal of Cultural Studies. SAGE Publications
McGuirk Justin. (2008) "Worried about the oil crisis?". Icon Magazine. Issue 64. Page 120-126

   Rapid developing countries produce a large proportion of the greenhouse gases, lots of voices have a strong opinion on developing world should act on pollution reduction but what is the reason for some developed countries having the right to lower the developing countries right to improve of their quality of life.

In the past 50 years more than half of the rain forest had fallen due to land development and the need of wood, “Unbelievably, over 200,000 acres of rainforest are burned every day in the world. That is over 150 acres lost every minute of every day.” The reason for destroying forest by fire,is to create land, creating land for agricultural uses. Due to the increase population around the world more land is require for food production, because of the low agricultural technology(low efficiency) in the non developed world. More land will be needed with the same amount of food produced compare to developed world.

    If the rainforest development is controlled by the developed countries,less food would be able to be produced and that might lead to a shortage of food in the area.

    For the past 150 years,industry had developed rapidly and developed world had released polluted gases and damaged the world severely. China and Indian had only started their developing around 1970’s.Why does the developing world had to take up the responsibility to save the planet, clean up the mess left over by the rich countries?

Maheshwari Weavers

The reason I took this class, is mostly because of my need to think about how to effectively design “for the other 90%”… of course, I do not like the fact that “other” is a key word in this statement. The work I am doing in India now is only the result of the close relationships that I formed there; these relationships were only possible after I had learned to speak Hindi fluently-- language is a big factor in absolving the sense of “otherness” that may at first be palpable when working across cultures.

I fell in love with India after living in Varanasi, one of the world’s oldest living cities, for a year. Then, I fell in love with Satyam, we have now been together almost 4 years. He is from Maheshwar, a small village in Madhya Pradesh, where he runs a grass-roots NGO, Chetanya Sewa: besides providing food and housing to the elderly, this NGO works on transforming the village slums. Though I still love India, I can no longer idealize it. The things I have experienced, seen, and heard from people who actually live in slums has made me feel that I should try and help as much as I can, if only perhaps because I am in the position to do so. I do not want to speak for anyone, the best thing I can do is just try to listen to what people tell me about their lives and their needs, and start from there.

The images I have posted are of Maya and Deepa, two Maheshwari handloom weavers, wearing saris that they have woven themselves. The hardcopies incorporate handloomed silk and portray the weavers’ lives and livelihoods. I will be working with the Maheshwari weavers again starting in July, this time with the assistance of a grant from Rotary International.

I realize the potential and the opportunity that the relatively new fair-trade market provides for these female weavers to substantially better their standard of living; also, the relative value of the dollar over the rupee means that profits can also be utilized in order to fund Chetanya Sewa, and there is a lot we can potentially do. But, the success of this project will rely on design input and how well we can create textile items that will be marketable in the West, mainly in the US. If we can do this, we will not only help the weavers raise their standard of living, but also bring in funds that can help transform the slums in the Khargone region. If anyone has any ideas about, or interest in, this sort of project, please talk to me...

Zoo Animals Versus Wild Animals; Jaschinski’s Camera Versus the Crittercam in the Art of Framing the Other

“I felt that I photographed something which I didn’t know. And it was almost like the camera saw it, not me,” –Britta Jaschinski

Steve Baker, in ‘Hunted by the Animal’, draws attention to the pervasive presence of the animal in contemporary art: it becomes the Other, both “vividly present” and “bewilderingly absent”. The animal both fascinates and repels as it can act as a signifier for the holistic grace of nature as much as for human estrangement from “the Real”.

Britta Jaschinski’s photos of animals in zoos and in the wild have become iconic. They are aesthetically provocative, emotive and morally ambiguous: they have been interpreted in various, even contradictory, ways. Baker claims Jaschinski’s photos in Wild Things visually collapse the arbitrary conceptual divide between zoo animals and wild animals, and yet her photos have also been adopted by the Born Free Poster Campaign, presumably, because they highlight the misery of captured animals.

The Guardian Weekend, in a quote proudly reproduced on Jaschinski’s website, states, “Jaschinski’s photos remind us what we stand to lose.’ The photos are definitely somewhat melancholic—is this because they mirror the loss of animals in an increasingly technologized world? John Berger has argued that the contemporary art world’s obsession with animals can be read as a sort of memorial to them: he believes that animals have already been largely lost to modern man. While a palpable sense of loss may be inherent in some contemporary works of art, this tendency is more likely a reflection of a human sense of alienation from the self, than a signification of the real lose of animals.

According to Lacan, human’s have an irking and unsettling sense of incompleteness and dislocation from their environment; animals, on the other hand, have been immobilised, forever frozen in the Mirror Stage—they are not “prey to language” and thus have no desire and no sense of the Other. With the current limited linguistic knowledge of animal language systems, it appears that animals lack the complex language faculty possessed by humans, and therefore, according to Lacan, are also without desire or a subconscious (of course, let us not forget that he said the same thing about women!). According to Lacan’s model, the human voyeuristic desire for the animal Other is an asymmetrical one: humans may yearn for the animal other, but, for animals, the human is not an Other at all and cannot really exist outside of the entire gelatinous mass that constitutes “the Real”.

If Jaschinski’s photos represent the melancholy loss of and yearning for the wild Other that stems from a purely human desire to return to “the Real”, then Crittercam claims to do the opposite: rather than generating images of animals framed as desired Others, Crittercam promises temporary embodiment within the Other that can override humanity and offer a first hand experience of animal subjectivity.







The Crittercam slogan of loosing one’s humanity to gain access to an animal’s perspective, along with the corporal world invoked by the editing of the Crittercam footage, and described by Haraway, is a shame, a farce, a fantasy. In the end we are, of course, limited to our own sense organs and locked out of a Sperm Whale’s echolocative and markedly different perception.

But the Crittercam, like the animals it is attached to, “senses” the world differently than a human body: it can collect and measure data (such as depth, speed, temp.) that our sense organs cannot even compute. This collection of data can be used to gain knowledge about the animal subject. The animals, roaming freely in their native habitats, are acting as subjects on their own terms. Haraway emphasises the importance of acknowledging this subjectivity; she even highlights the necessity of striving towards interspecies communication:

We have to learn who they [animals] are in all their nonunitary otherness in order to have a conversation on the basis of carefully constructed, multi-sensory, compounded languages.

If these “multi-sensory, compounded languages” ever develop, they may very well be reliant on technologies that transcend human physiology and can decode and interpret different modes of perception that allow various animal species to perceive and make sense of their habitats through sense organs different from our own. This venture will also most likely entail “infoldings of the flesh” that will act as supplementary human sense organs to compensate for our inherent differences.

The ethical question that arises in exploring the relationship between animals and humans, whether through art or science, is formed around the contested notion of animal subjectivity. Eduardo Kac has said that his GFP bunny is the beginning of a new form of art that entails the “creation of an art subject rather than an art object”. But couldn’t one easily restructure this sentence and generate a very different statement that is actually equally true: The GFP bunny is the objectification of a subject in the name of art. A lot of contemporary art works, like the GFP bunny, have an aesthetic and conceptual allure that fascinates the viewer with its sheer uniqueness… but, when it comes right down to it, do such works do anything beyond exploiting the human desire to objectify and possess the Other? This is an open-ended question to say the least.

“Art, no matter how apparently cruelly, does not shrink from the sight of the animal. In doing so it is one of the few contemporary forms that can claim properly and respectfully to attend to the otherness of the animal.”– Steve Baker

"If you want to get close to a tiger, get an elephant"

http://quicksilverscreen.com/watch?video=48477

Artificial / Natural

I find it difficult, when discussing human/animal relationships, to avoid a “Save The Animals” sentimentality. Nature is a boundary we have created and placed certain ideals upon, yet still continue to violate. There is a need for ever expanding knowledge into a world that is not our own. Particularly, it seems, if of benefit to us. This is something I can understand to a degree, however feel that it just isn’t our place.
Crittercam is a prime example of a human “research tool” that is clearly overstepping a line. These cameras “allow scientists to study animal behaviour without interference by a human observer”. Sure, but the result is still a wild, majestic lion with a great big camera box around its neck.
Donna Haraway describes technology as an organ, an “infolding of the flesh”. In Material culture we discussed how we can “extend our senses”, a video camera simply being an extension of our sight. But should we be extending ourselves into somewhere we don’t belong?

Crittercam is designed for the purpose of observing animal behaviour in a way we otherwise couldn’t. This is something I initially doubted, the very presence of a human technology would surely alter an animals behaviour. However, I looked into a suggested documentary ‘Tigers: Spy in the Jungle’ that involved elephants carrying (badly) disguised cameras through the jungle to capture tigers in their private habitats. And honestly, it was wonderful. The animals showed no signs of disturbance and there was some really exciting footage. However, they didn’t have cameras glued to their backs.
What was it really illustrating to us that we need to learn?

Haraway explains how Crittercam may be used to not only understand an animals ecology but also show us how to change as a consequence. But from over a decades worth of data, has anything changed? Perhaps our zoos might expand, with more “accurate” enclosures for otherwise unobtainable creatures.
Wouldn’t that be lovely.

Poor Entrepreneurs

Very small loans better known as microcredits caused sensations within the last years and onwards over the western and less developed countries.
The small loans are made to give poor people the chance to establish a sustainable means of income. These people don’t fulfil the minimal qualifications to gain access to traditional credits usually.

By the help of the microcredits, poor entrepreneurs gain the possibilities to
start self-employed projects to earn money
to find a way out of the poverty.

Trust building and help during difficult times are the main principles between the borrowers and the trust-driven banks across India, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Morocco, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Ethopia, Serbia, Russia, Pakistan, Mexico and Brazil.

In November 2008 the first micro-lending website kiva.org has launched its service on the Internet successfully. People donate money and lend it to the poor. The service provides useful information about the people’s backgrounds
and the planed projects of the unemployed.

Beside the sensation about small loans in the less developed countries
exists criticism. Gina Neff of the Left Business Observer claims that the success has been judged basically from a lender’s perspective. She mentions that the microlending Grameen Bank’s high repayment rate doesn’t reflect the number of women who are repeat borrowers that have became dependent on loans for household expenditures.

Also in the developed world like in the United States exists microcredits to help out people to find a way out of their poverty for example.

About 12.6 % of the United States population, 37 million people live below the poverty line. However microloans have less appeal on the people because they don’t


believe in escaping poverty by private enterprise.

Microloans U.S.

Kiva - microloans online

Journal of microfinance

and this as well 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJal-Ohggd4&eurl=http://www.karmatube.org/videos.php?id=1322

ok so the videos didn't work heres the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Sb6RmRMbBY

We place ourselves outside, above or beyond “nature”

nature
Noun
1. the whole system of the existence, forces, and events of the physical world that are not controlled by human beings

I don’t have a problem with the fact that we are outside, above or beyond nature because by definition that’s what it is. I think it’s important to remember that we invented the word nature and created the model that it is. We created its boundaries, what it is and what it stands for. As a model it doesn’t actually tell us what is going on and if anything tells us more about ourselves than the universe around us. This is true for any model we make be it nature, the future or time. Just because we have created this model doesn’t mean it is an accurate representation of what is happening around us.

Artificial Natural - Unnatural Selection

Technology seems to have far too much control over evolution. Take a look at human evolution for example; we inject ourselves with many different vaccinations to protect ourselves from viruses and as a result natural selection becomes far more limited. As people are now immune to the virus, the process of natural selection is altered. Now, the weaker individuals are no longer eradicated from the population, but instead it may now be that the people with no money for vaccinations are targeted in this process. Due to the technological changes brought about by humans, we have altered a natural balance of how the world should evolve on many different levels.

The process of evolution no longer seems to be that of natural selection but that of an unnatural form. Evolution is no longer based so much on survival of the fittest, but more the survival based on an organism’s compatibility with humans and their technologies. If evolutionary changes for the worse come about through environmental and atmospherical change, then humans are greatly to blame for the ones occurring in the world. The Atlantic cod for example, has decreased in size from fifteen centimeters to ten centimeters over a short period of time. The main reason for this, as researchers say, is that only the larger cod fish get caught in the nets and therefore the smaller fish have a favorable phenotype for survival, which they will then pass on. They have also found that the fish reach reproductive age twenty-five percent earlier than usual so that they can lay eggs before they got caught or killed. As a result, the cod fish lay eggs prematurely and become a weaker population due to the lack of ‘natural’ growth. The fish are no longer evolving naturally and progressively, but unnaturally due to technological inflictions that humans have put on them, quite literally stunting their growth as a species.

It seems that what has happened is that with technology and human interference in specific animal niches, the balance between humans and animals has been upset completely. Humans are using up far too many resources, destroying the atmosphere, being generally wasteful, and other animal species are in danger of extinction as a result. So how can we change our human impacts to that of naturally occurring evolution? Designers behind a lot of technology, need to start learning about what is happening within the world, an attempt to design for the better. In biology, biodiversity is the key ingredient to a sustainable community, and that is why we should aim to restore this currently uneven balance back to a ‘natural’ measure by designing for the future. Not just the future of humanity but that of an ecosystem as a whole.


References:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/13/science/13fish.html
http://www.ioe.ucla.edu/news/article.asp?parentid=2064

Recycling

Though I approve of recycling and its merits, I do not recycle everything I dispose of. I refill my water bottles when I can. I buy the reusable linen or hemp bags from Iceland and Sainsbury’s when I am grocery shopping, but I often end up shopping while I am already out, so I do not have my reusable bags with me. Then I end up either buying more reusable bags, which I feel is the store’s way of making more of a profit rather than helping the environment, or giving up and using plastic bags. Once I get my groceries home, I do use one or two plastic bags for trash, but I cannot save them all indefinitely due to lack of storage. I could save them for months, but sometimes end up throwing them away anyway. Gay Hawkins questioned, “If we accept that disposal is necessary, how could it be recast in ways that acknowledge the ethical significance of rubbish without generating moral righteousness or resentment?” But I cannot do everything myself and I wonder if others are making an attempt to recycle, or am I actually doing more than others? I think recycling is a good thing, and I do not want to contribute to overflowing landfills, but I am a busy student with limited time to devote to saving the environment. And I resent the fact that the older generations say it is up to my generation to fix everything they have messed up. Everyone is responsible to do what he or she can. So I will try to continue to do my part.

-Emily Suber