I collaborate with the team at Solar Cities, they do wonderful work and I think, given the topic of this article and your work with water and waste systems, that you would like to see the work of tireless evangelist and out and out gentleman and scholar Dr Thomas Henry Culhane. There are currently ‘Blue Flame Tours’ in progress or planning in the US, Portugal, Greece, the UK, and we just finished one here in IReland. This is real old school, chinese waste upcycling systems with so many boons for the environment and their point of source users.
As Ivan Illich once said: ”
The future of an authentically sustainable society depends upon the separation of shit and state”
1. In an expanding population (like we have had for hundreds or thousands of years), older technologies will Persist longer…albeit in sometimes small amounts. But this effect is less true in a stable or shrinking population.
2. In my field, information technology, this effect does hold true in many cases, strangely enough. For example, there are still people programming in the old fortran prograMming language.
3. But it’s worth noting that this effect doesn’t always hold true. When automobiles first arrived, horse travel had existed for thousands of years. And while there is still horse travel today, it is almost insignificant in prevalence compared to automobile travel. Sometimes Venerable technologies just fall hard and are replaced outright. In computers, the “green-screen” text monitors dominated for decades…but then Were rapidly replaced by graphical monitors. The text ones will never return. And while coal and oil haVe powered the industrialized world for a century…it’s very likely that Solar will soon replace it outright.
Regarding the comment about horse travel. You just haven’t waited long enough. Once the cheap energy that allows us to have automobiles is gone you will see horse travel back. that is unless we make them go extinct before that!!
“Flush and forget” or “drop and store” are some of the most common strategies for human waste “treatment” around the globe. These approaches can be seen in massive...
Hi there,
I collaborate with the team at Solar Cities, they do wonderful work and I think, given the topic of this article and your work with water and waste systems, that you would like to see the work of tireless evangelist and out and out gentleman and scholar Dr Thomas Henry Culhane. There are currently ‘Blue Flame Tours’ in progress or planning in the US, Portugal, Greece, the UK, and we just finished one here in IReland. This is real old school, chinese waste upcycling systems with so many boons for the environment and their point of source users.
As Ivan Illich once said: ”
The future of an authentically sustainable society depends upon the separation of shit and state”
Check out TH’s work at http://www.solarcities.eu
1. In an expanding population (like we have had for hundreds or thousands of years), older technologies will Persist longer…albeit in sometimes small amounts. But this effect is less true in a stable or shrinking population.
2. In my field, information technology, this effect does hold true in many cases, strangely enough. For example, there are still people programming in the old fortran prograMming language.
3. But it’s worth noting that this effect doesn’t always hold true. When automobiles first arrived, horse travel had existed for thousands of years. And while there is still horse travel today, it is almost insignificant in prevalence compared to automobile travel. Sometimes Venerable technologies just fall hard and are replaced outright. In computers, the “green-screen” text monitors dominated for decades…but then Were rapidly replaced by graphical monitors. The text ones will never return. And while coal and oil haVe powered the industrialized world for a century…it’s very likely that Solar will soon replace it outright.
Regarding the comment about horse travel. You just haven’t waited long enough. Once the cheap energy that allows us to have automobiles is gone you will see horse travel back. that is unless we make them go extinct before that!!
Before you conclude that “solar will replace coal and oil,” consider figure 6 AND THE LARGER CONTEXT here: https://www.engineeringforchange.org/lets-stop-using-the-word-sustainability/