If You Build It, They Will Come: Learning and Expanding on What Our Fellow Humans, and Nature, Teach Us
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10/11/2010
I was a hoarder as a tyke, saving anything that could possibly be used for craft projects. One of my more “useful” inventions was a rotating necklace holder that I made out of a tennis ball canister. No wonder “The Genius of the Tinkerer,” a recent piece by Steven Johnson in the Wall Street Journal, struck a chord (for the record, my creations were never genius, though perhaps kid-cool). Adapted from Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, the article explored human ingenuity, stressing the value of sharing ideas in order to build on them.
As a tribute to that ingenuity, “[anthropologist] Stephen Jay Gould maintained an odd collection of sandals made from recycled automobile tires, purchased during his travels through the developing world,” writes Johnson. “But he also saw them as a metaphor for the patterns of innovation in the biological world. Nature’s innovations, too, rely on spare parts.” In other words, nature builds on what it has to work with, with results that we humans often consider remarkable—and also useful to our needs. The field of biomimicry is based on that concept: Researchers in the field study nature’s designs to apply to human engineering problems. From swimsuits to windmill blades, there’s eco-inspiration everywhere.
Of course, our environment also teaches us to “waste not.” To build its machinery, nature relies on “bottom-up” processes, whereby the final assembly is created from the fewest parts possible. In contrast, human manufacturing has typically involved “top-down” processes that can result in wasted material in the end. The twentieth century polymath Buckminster Fuller—referenced in Johnson’s article—was prescient in recognizing the value of scaled-down resources. “In the late 1920s…Fuller began designing a series of pre-fabricated homes to be built using as few materials as possible,” writes Jessica Leber in “Green Before His Time.” “He firmly believed that we live on one interconnected world—‘spaceship earth’—as he called it, and that each individual’s success depends on the well-being of all its passengers.” It’s an aphorism Johnson alludes to in his WSJ piece. Indeed, another lesson we can learn from nature’s way of building on availability is the importance of sharing innovative ideas for the good of mankind rather than hoarding them like the blueprints for, say, tennis-ball-canister-necklace-holders…or other intellectual property. Keeping ideas under lock-and-key in R&D labs might make sense in some respects, but “they reduce the overall network of minds that can potentially engage with a problem,” writes Johnson.
Around 1946, Buckminster Fuller modeled an entire community of “dwelling machines.” The model for these homes was re-fabricated in 2008. Patrick Hobgood, Iannis Kandyliaris, and Ilias Papageorgiou
Fortunately, some businesses are recognizing this. Johnson highlights Nike, which announced earlier this year a web-based Marketplace called GreenXchange, “where it has publicly released more than 400 of its patents that involve environmentally friendly materials or technologies…This makes it possible for outside firms to improve on those innovations, creating new value that Nike might ultimately be able to put to use itself in its own products,” or that other companies might use for their own ventures. As Johnson points out, a hypothetical scenario that GreenXchange invoked could be a mountain bike company learning how to make more sustainable tires by drawing on “an environmentally-sound rubber originally invented for use in running shoes.”
In the end, despite our proprietary instincts, “Ideas are works of bricolage,” writes Johnson. “They are, almost inevitably, networks of other ideas.” And just as nature uses what’s accessible in its environment, we should put our heads together to use what’s in ours—because really, don’t we all want to enjoy a smooth ride on Spaceship Earth?
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Unchallenged
Unchallenged science...................One day, I trust population dynamics experts will take direction action by discussing extant scientific evidence of human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth, despite conspicuous resistance to discussions of this kind. For a moment imagine that human overpopulation of a living Earth is like a live human organism with lung cancer. Please note that although it is exceedingly difficult to talk about "the big C", it is much more demanding to speak out about the cause of the lung cancer: smoking tobacco products. Similarly, despite the challenges we have to speaking out loudly and clearly about the skyrocketing increase of absolute global human population numbers during my lifetime, it is much more difficult say anything about what might be causing global human population growth. Of course that brings us to human population dynamics. Perhaps this is the last of the last taboos. The denial of the science of human population dynamics appears to me as one of the most colossal failures of nerve in human history. The abandonment of intellectual honesty, moral courage responsible action is unconscionable. Could what is culturally prescribed, socially correct, economically expedient and politically convenient be buttressing our propensity to make so great a mistake?
Human population dynamics will become a topic of open discussion soon, that is certain. Global gag rules will be eschewed rather than promulgated. When that time comes, I trust it is not too late to make a difference in the lives of our children, who are probably going to be unimaginably victimized not only by the arrogance, folly and greed of their elders but also by their cowardice.
Lester Brown reminds us now that "civilization's foundation is eroding". He and we pay careful attention to the distinctly human-driven symptoms of what ails us and report them everywhere; but when will we examine the possible causes of the ailment itself and report findings of what appears to be a non-recursive biological problem? If the human overpopulation of Earth is the problem, when is extant scientific evidence of human population dynamics to become the object of rigorous scrutiny, careful analysis and professional reports?
Many too many experts possess scientific knowledge of human population dynamics and human overpopulation of the Earth, I believe. They have remained electively mute. They know and could do better; they have both the tools and the empirical evidence at their fingertips; they are abdicating their responsibility in raising awareness of the those that still do not yet see and understand the human-induced aspects of the global predicament looming before humanity.
Many experts have had a multitude of opportunities to comment on human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of Earth in professional conferences like those sponsored every four years by the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population and in an array of speciality journals dedicated to human ecology, population biology, human demography, etc. The experts have uniformly refused. Their abject failure to respond more ably to the challenges presented to humanity in our time is woefully inadequate and inexcusable. It would be unfortunate if the silence of so many was ever construed as giving consent to this ignominous behavior.
Let us look for a moment at the human population dynamics research by Hopfenberg and Pimentel on human population numbers as a function of food supply. The evidence in their article, Human Population Numbers as a Function of Food Supply, is correlational data. The evidence appears to indicate the presence of a non-recursive biological problem; the independent variable is the food supply and the dependent variable is human population numbers. What could this correlation mean? Well, if we stop and think about it, it would reverse the widely shared, consensually validated and culturally syntonic idea that human beings are increasing the food supply to feed a growing population. According to prevailing thought, human population numbers is the independent variable and food is the dependent variable.
Perhaps a correct understanding of this relationship has potentially profound implications for the future of life on Earth. Whether human population numbers is the dependent or independent variable is what matters. The correlational data from Hopfenberg and Pimentel indicates the former. Human population numbers is the dependent variable. Since 2001 I have stated that this evidence from Hopfenberg/Pimentel provides us with the best available scientific evidence of human population dynamics. This evidence directly contradicts data from many sources that indicate human population numbers is the independent variable.
Except for the human species, no other species increases the food supply for its consumption. Other species live within the carrying capacity the Earth and its environs provide them for existence. If human beings are actually driving food production, and not the other way around, then we humans are truly exceptional. And if we choose to believe we are exceptional with regard to our population dynamics, then I believe we are no longer speaking of scientific evidence but rather in logically contrived, ideologically forced and culturally biased terms.
Will a professional in a field of study with appropriate expertise please point to the peer-reviewed, published research that supports the hypothesis that the population dynamics of human beings is essentially different from, not common to, the population dynamics of other living things? Where is the scientific evidence for such human exceptionalism in the population dynamics of the human species to be found? While much preternatural evidence has been presented as if it was acceptable evidence of human exceptionalism, I can find no adequate science that indicates human population dynamics is different from the population dynamics of other species.
Thank you for taking the time to consider this perspective.
Sincerely,
Steve