I was first drawn to healthcare facility design in my fifth (and final) year studying architecture at IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal, India. In our fourth year we had just completed a project on the theory behind design thinking, and I was attracted to the complexity of operational and building systems that exist in a modern healthcare facility, leading to complex relationships between the constituent parts (different clinical, inpatient and support departments) that made up the whole.
I used to play chess and bridge fairly well, but once I got involved in this multi-dimensional game of architectural design (especially healthcare design) the attraction of these board and card games paled in comparison. For my Bachelor’s of Architecture thesis I chose to redesign the Hinduja Hospital at Mahim, Mumbai, India and enjoyed myself thoroughly. This enjoyment showed up in the grade, “Ex” for excellent.
That was a long time back and I have a lot of designs for hospitals under my belt since then. In this time I have worked for five organizations solely engaged in the design and construction of healthcare facilities. It’s been a long journey, difficult at times, now I find myself at the age of 60 mentoring other architects projects and pursuing a growing interest in green or sustainable healthcare projects.
I have always been comfortable working with a bed in the room since my college days, but never found much opportunity to do so after that. Now in the twilight of my life I have come full circle, as I am working out of my residence I can lie down now and then and let my mind wander. I get my best design “eureka” moments this way.
My best and favourite healthcare facility design has been one I did a long time back, Asian Heart Institute, Mumbai, India and it was made possible by having an exceptionally visionary client, the cardiac surgeon Dr Ramakant Panda. Below is a write-up released by AHI’s public relations department.
“Mumbai’s renowned Asian Heart Institute (AHI) has been ranked by an international organisation the “safest cardiac hospital in the world” with the lowest mortality rate, a hospital official said Friday. AHI’s vice chairman and managing director Ramakant Panda said the hospital was accorded the honour among 15 hospitals in eight countries that participated in the International Cardiac Benchmarking survey conducted by the Joint Commission International (JCI). “This included data analysis of more than 6000 cardiac surgeries between October 2009-March 2011,” Panda told IANS here.The 15 JCI accredited hospitals had to provide data captured on a daily basis on the surgeries conducted and reported, set parameters to measure the quality of care provided and cooperate with verification visits by principals, said Panda, who performed heart surgery on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh nearly three years ago.“After the detailed three-year study, AHI has ranked No.1 in terms of ‘lowest complication rates’ and ‘highest survival rates’ as per the JCI survey,” he said.”
Design as Optimization, Not Compromise
We can make no better high-leverage investments for the future than improving the quality of designers’ “mindware” – assets that unlike physical ones, don’t depreciate but, rather, ripen with age and experience. Many architects, engineers and other designers, however, are not being well taught. J. Baldwin, long the technology editor of Whole Earth Review, was told on his first day in design school that “design is the art of compromise.” Design, he was instructed, means choosing the least unsatisfactory trade-offs between many desirable but incompatible goals. He believed that this formulation described “a political process masquerading as a design process,” and he realized it was wrong.
His inspiration came as he gazed out of the classroom window and saw a pelican catching a fish. For the past 3.8 billion years or so, nature has been running a successful design laboratory in which everything is continually improved and rigorously retested. The result, life, is what works. Whatever doesn’t work gets recalled by the Manufacturer. Every naturalist knows from observation that nature does not compromise; nature optimizes. A pelican, nearing perfection (for now) after some 90 million years of development, is not a compromise between a seagull and a crow. It is the best possible pelican.
A pelican, however, is not optimized within a vacuum. It exists in an ecosystem, and each part of that ecosystem, in turn, is optimized in evolution with the pelican. A change in the pelican or in any aspect of its ecosystem could have widespread ramifications throughout the system, because all its elements are coevolving to work optimally together. For the same reason, an engineer can’t design an optimal fan except as an integral part of its surrounding cooling system, nor an optimal cooling system without integration into its site, neighbourhood, climate, and culture. The greater the degree to which the components of a system are optimized together, the more trade-offs and compromises that seem inevitable at the individual component level becomes unnecessary. These processes create synergies and felicities for the entire system.
The Band – (I Don’t Want To) Hang Up My Rock And Roll Shoes
India’s Health Care Industry
Design and the Bhagwad Gita, Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ and Baruch Spinoza
Architectural Design and Ethics: Tools for Survival
By Thomas Fisher: Extracts
The Bhagwad Gita
Take one of the oldest religious texts in existence, the Bhagwad Gita. It begins with the warrior, Arjuna, in a crisis, standing in his chariot and about to go into a battle that would pit allies and friends against each other, a situation not unlike what could happen in a future of diminishing resources and growing population, in which not only enemies might go to war with each other, but also families and neighbours. The god Krishna’s response to Arjuna’s despair with the seemingly paradoxical idea that Arjuna should do his duty and go into war without worry about dying or causing others to die, since the body and the material world in general are ephemeral and that nothing can kill the eternal soul in us.
To modern ears, such advice seems quite odd, since we have largely become accustomed to see the material world as permanent, seeing death as something to fear, and viewing the killing of others as an evil. How could a god, in this case Krishna, advise doing just the opposite? Krishna offers Arjuna, however, a profound ethical insight of great use to all of us as we face difficulties as metaphorical charioteers on life’s battlefields. We often think, as Arjuna did, that material reality really matters, that we can’t live without it and that its loss would leave us bereft, but in fact very little of it matters and we can live without all but the essentials needed to sustain life. Moreover, we can find happiness without it if, as Krishna urges Arjuna, we focus on doing our duty and serving others. As we enter a period in which many people will be needing help, valuing the duty of helping others will become key to our making it through our collective hardships.
The argument in the Gita also may seem odd to designers who make things in the physical environment all the time. Reading Krishna’s words to Arjuna might tempt a designer a designer to do what Samuel Johnson did when hearing of David Hume’s scepticism about cause and effect and reality in general: Johnson went over and kicked a rock to demonstrate that things do exist and that kicking a rock has the effect of causing pain. But Krishna isn’t saying that the material world doesn’t exist, only that it is ephemeral, constantly changing, and ultimately beyond our control, and that the only thing that lasts is the soul which exists in all living things. Every designer knows that what we do in the material world will not last, that things deteriorate, break, or fall apart. And while we rarely talk about it this way, designers also know that the best work has a spirit or soul that we find compelling and that causes us to care.
What the Gita suggests for the design community is that what matters is the spirit in what we do: how much the work helps people feel whole and how much it speaks to the spirit in every living thing affected by it. How does our work enhance the humanity not only of those who commission, use, or inhabit it, but also the humanity of those who fabricate, assemble, or build it, and those who will have the responsibility to care for, dispose, or reuse it after we have gone? And how does our work enhance the quality of life of other species – the habitat of plants and animals in the locations where what we use is harvested, where what we create is fabricated, or where what we design gets built?
Gautama Buddha
The Buddha offers another take on this ethical idea, putting less emphasis on serving others and more on being happy and avoiding suffering. Coming from a wealthy family, Buddha knew how much time and attention people paid to earning money and acquiring goods as the way to happiness, but he also saw how much unhappiness – ranging from envy and jealousy to fear and anger – resulted from this very process of gaining possessions. After a period in which he tried to rid himself of all possessions to the point of almost starving himself, he realized that the problem lay not with things, but in our thinking about them. The suffering he saw around him came from our attachment to things, and in our inability to find peace of mind, the lack of which leads us to seek it in the material world. Controlling the mind, eliminating desire, needing nothing, resenting nothing, relinquishing all attachments, focusing on the present moment, having compassion for others, being generous and kind to others – such is some of the wise counsel that the Buddha offers as the way to happiness.
Underlying this is the ethical idea of “the middle way’, the notion that we should seek a path of moderation between the extremes of self-indulgence and self-mortification. That idea also occurs in the ethics of Aristotle and it represents a position quite contrary to the extremism of the modern world, in which extraordinary levels of wealth and poverty, over-consumption and deprivation, exist simultaneously. Nor is it the way in which most of the design world has gone over the last century. Most designers depend upon wealthy individuals, organizations, and governments for many of their commissions, resulting in designers directly serving a very small fraction of the total population. At the same time, the design community has tended to recognize and award work that stakes out an extreme position of one kind or another. Moderation in a project rarely gets covered by the media, rarely draws people’s attention, or rarely attracts the kind of clients that designers sometimes assume is necessary to do good work.
On top of that, the Buddha’s urging that we not be attached to things or not desire possessions also seems to be contrary to what designers do, which is to make things that other people need and want. Is Buddhism antithetical to design? The answer depends upon whether we are talking about current forms of design practice or about design generally. As E. F. Schumacher observed about economics in his development of “Buddhist economics’, design practice has come to reflect the world in which we work, a world in which, as the buddha observed, many people continue to look at material possessions as the way to happiness, rather than their own state of mind. But there has always been design, and we need to discover a design equivalent to Schumacher’s economics, a “Buddhist design’ that isn’t about the design of Buddhist temples or decorative art, but is instead about imagining a form of design that leads to happiness through an embrace of humility, moderation, openness, and acceptance of limits.
Schumacher urged his fellow economists to re-establish their field on some basis other than greed and envy, which he saw as the unhealthy and unhappy motivators for so much economic activity. Designers need to do the same. While greed may want people to want a larger house, a bigger office, or a flashier car, and while envy may lead people to commission work that exceeds in some way that of a competitor, such frames of mind arise out of unhappiness and, as the Buddha mentioned, can only result in unhappiness, which is hardly in the best interest of anyone, be it the designer or those who commission or use what we do. If the purpose of design is to relieve suffering, to improve the world and people’s lot in it in some way, then continuing the cycle of suffering, as the Buddha describes it, renders what we do rather pointless, and possibly leads to the ironic result of design being less valued even as the design for it increases. Like addicts, our culture has become hooked on the quantity of things, wanting more and more of what, in psychological terms, means less and less. ‘Buddhist design’ would refocus people away from quantities of things to the quality of each thing, showing us how we actually need much less than we think we do, so that we can enjoy each thing more.
In a sense, Buddhist design may be more like the natural world we see all around us. It might be made, like a forest, almost entirely of biodegradable materials that serve their purpose and then disappear without a trace. It might consist of materials like rock, that can be endlessly reused by whoever needs it at the time. It might generate wastes, like a plant or animal, that serves as food for others or fertilizer that enhances the richness of the whole. And it might use the least amount of material possible, like a bird, to achieve the greatest efficiency and beauty. The Buddha achieved enlightenment while meditating under a Bodhi tree and we, in the design community, might find similar insight contemplating nature in this way, seeing how we might help others, and ourselves, actually achieve the happiness that people turn to our work for. This will become especially important in the future, when the only real abundance most of us will have will lie inside ourselves.
Jesus Christ
A third ethic to arise out of religion that can serve us as a useful tool is that of Jesus. It has become difficult to talk about Jesus’ ethics because of the current wave of fundamentalism and fanaticism that has emerged from all three of the major Western religions – Judaism, Islam and Christianity. At a time when the writer and former nun, Karen Armstrong has argued, some people see religious texts as scientific facts, as having to be literally true in order to be believed, even talking about Jesus as an ethicist will offend some. But so be it. As Thomas Jefferson did with his bible, cutting out the metaphysics to get to the ethics of what Jesus said in the New Testament, lets look at what the ethical core of what Jesus said has to offer us as we look ahead to a world that may increasingly look like the world that Jesus knew some 2000 years back.
What is most striking about Jesus’ ethical pronouncements is how much they address the needs of the poor. Just as Krishna would urge us to serve others and the Buddha to relinquish attachments, Jesus would have us give up our wealth and share it with the most impoverished people. This radical realignment of wealth, of people voluntarily giving up most of what they own so that everyone could have enough, does seem to get lost in the conflation of Christianity with capitalism that has become common, at least among many conservatives in countries like the USA. It is hard not to read Jesus’ pronouncement that the ‘meek shall inherit the earth’, and wonder about all the competition, aggression, and bloodshed that has characterized the behaviour of some Christians towards other religions or other denominations in their own religion. As Karen Armstrong observed in an interview, ‘religion…is about losing your ego…We need to rediscover what is in our religions, which have gotten overlaid with generations of egotistical and lazy theology. The current thinking – my God is better than your God – is highly irreligious’.
Many designers might be very sympathetic to Jesus’ compassion for the poor and maybe even his urging that we give to the poor everything we don’t actually need in order to live, but design remains a field for the relatively well off and out of reach for most people who do not have the money to pay our fees. What the ethics of Jesus forces us to confront is the question of how design practice can serve the poor, the very people who need, even more than the wealthy, what designers have to offer: that capacity to do more with less, to satisfy the greatest number of needs with the least amount of effort or resources. One way to achieve this would be to see design as a form of public health, which is similar to the way in which Jesus saw his role as ministering to the people that the government and established religion of the day had forgotten.
A public health version of design would entail dealing with the problems that the greatest number of people, especially the greatest number of poor people face in their daily lives. Cameron Sinclair, whose organization, Architecture for Humanity, has come perhaps the closest to achieving such a goal, once said that the one thing people around the world seem to need most is a way of fastening different materials together. Poor people can often get access to cast-off or low-cost building supplies, but connecting materials together in ways that keep out the elements or withstand the wind or possible earthquakes poses a real and largely unaddressed problem. The same is true for peoples need for basic services – water and electric supply, sanitary and storm sewage, security and safety elements. The poorest people lack such essentials, access to which should be a fundamental human right. That billions of people lack one or more of these basic services – access to clean water, to sanitation, to electricity, to security – is something that the design community should take on as both our responsibility and an opportunity. Public health designers, able to address the simplest and most generic challenges in extremely low-cost and low-skill ways, would have billions of people around the globe as users, with governments and non-profit agencies of all types as clients. If designers do not literally give, as Jesus suggests their second coat to the poor, we can at least give the poor our best thinking and most creative ideas.
As Jesus knew well, giving of our time and talent to those most in need will have a transformative effect on us as well as them. That transformation might lead at least some designers to take on, not just the objects and environments people need, but also the processes by which materials get made, products get produced, and supplies get shipped – all with the goal of maximizing local economies, developing local skills and minimizing environmental impacts. We could help end poverty simply by requiring that everything we use be made locally and sustainably. At the same time, the transformation might prompt us to design into our work the process by which it will be deconstructed, recycled, or repurposed, all of which can empower ordinary people and leverage their inherent creativity. The design community must find a way to serve the poor in more than just token ways. It is not just our professional and ethical responsibility to do so, but it is the great-untapped opportunity of our disciplines. For what Jesus said was prophetic: the long-term stewards of the planet, those who will inherit the earth, are the very people who are most ignored and least serves by us today. And if the rest of us continue in our excessive levels of consumption, we will all be like them soon enough.
Baruch Spinoza
A fourth ethics, not specifically religious, but with a strong metaphysical character, is that of the seventeenth century Jewish philosopher, Spinoza. He argued in his Ethics that everything – evry being, every particle, the cosmos itself – is one substance, which he called God/Nature, with physical and mental attributes, and existing in an almost infinite number of modes. Spinoza’s ethics sounds odd at first, and so abstract that only a philosopher might appreciate it, but the more you think about his ideas, the more they open up connections for us. For example, the notion of reality as a single substance brings to mind the work of modern-day physicists who see matter and energy as different modes of the same thing, existing at different speeds. Spinoza’s ethics also anticipated those who search for the so-called theory of everything, in the belief that all reality must follow the same physical laws. In calling this single substance God/Nature, Spinoza elides past the divide that exists in our own time between religion and science by claiming that God and Nature are really the same thing and that God is not some transcendent intelligent designer outside the natural world but is immanent in and inseparable from nature. No wonder Spinoza got in trouble with Jewish authorities in his own day, for his theistic views were much closer to the pantheism of the ancient Greeks than to anything in the Old Testament.
The ethical implications of Spinoza’s one substance also conflict with the dichotomous world view so prevalent today and around which we have designed our built environment. Spinoza argued that unethical behaviour begins with the assumption that individuals or groups are separate from each other and that there is some advantage to be had over others. By denying the validity of that very assumption, Spinoza’s ethics make it impossible or at least completely self-destructive to cause harm to others, for in doing so we only harm ourselves, since they are us, all part of a single, inseparable substance. Complexity theory has made a similar argument about the physical world – that everything, at least on earth, is interconnected so that the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings can contribute to causing a hurricane halfway around the world. Spinoza’s ethics applies a related concept to human actions: everything that we do comes back to affect us. We may not see it or know how or when it happens. It may not happen immediately or in the same way we acted towards others, but our being of one substance makes it impossible for us not to be negatively affected by our negative actions – or positively affected by our positive ones.
Spinoza’s one-substance idea also applies to the natural world, so that the damage we cause to nature, we cause to ourselves as well as to God, which he saw as identical with nature. If we accept Spinoza’s premise, the only conclusion we can draw from it is that we need to act in ways that help, improve, or enhance others – other people, other species, future generations – for there is no other way to help ourselves. That conception of service, of finding our happiness by fostering happiness in others, lies at the heart of all helping professions and offers a very different way of thinking about economics. Instead of an economy based on self-interest – which in Spinoza’s terms might mean self-harm – we might imagine an economy based on other-interest, on giving as much as possible to as many others as we can. This notion of a ‘gift’ economy, in which value and incentives depend on how much we give rather than how much we get, may work best at relatively small scales, among families, tribes, or communities, but that may be the scale many of us live in the future, once we run out of the inexpensive fossil fuels that have so expanded the scale of modern life. The gift economy also seems well suited to the internet age, in which people give advice with no quid pro quo, and where millions of people have access to and benefit from what others have to offer. Indeed, we might see the world wide web as a Spinozan infrastructure, one of many ways in which we come to see ourselves and act as a single interconnected mutually reinforcing entity.
Consider the Cherry Tree
Consider the cherry tree: thousands of blossoms create fruit for birds, humans, and other animals, in order that one pit might eventually fall onto the ground, take root and grow. Who would look at the ground littered with cherry blossoms and complain, “How inefficient and wasteful!” The tree makes copious blossoms and fruit without depleting its environment. Once they fall on the ground, their materials decompose and break down into nutrients that nourish microorganisms, insects, plants, animals and soil. Although the tree makes more of its “product” than it needs for its own success in an ecosystem, this abundance has evolved (through millions of years of success and failure or, in business terms, R&D), to serve rich and varied purposes. In fact, the trees fecundity nourishes just about everything around it.
What might the human-built world look like if a cherry tree had produced it?
We know what an eco-efficient building looks like. It is a big energy saver. It minimizes air infiltration by sealing places that might leak. (The windows do not open.) It lowers solar income with dark-tinted glass, diminishing the cooling load on the buildings air-conditioning system and thereby cutting the amount of fossil-fuel energy used. The power plant in turn releases a smaller amount of pollutants into the environment, and whoever foots the electricity bill spends less money. The local utility honours the building as the most energy-saving in its area and holds it up as a model for environmentally conscious design. If all buildings were designed and built in this way, it proclaims, businesses could do right by the environment and save money at the same time.
Here’s how we imagine the cherry tree would do it: during the daytime, light pours in. Views of the outdoors through large un-tinted windows are plentiful – each of the occupants has five views from wherever he or she happens to sit. Delicious, affordable food and beverages are available to employees in a café that opens onto a sun-filled courtyard. In the office space, each of them controls the flow of fresh air and the temperature of their personal breathing zones. The windows open. The cooling system maximizes natural airflows, as in a hacienda: at night the system flushes the building with cool evening air, bringing the temperature down and clearing the rooms of stale air and toxins. A layer of native grass covers the building’s roof, making it more attractive to songbirds and absorbing water runoff, while at the same time protecting the roof from thermal shock and ultraviolet degradation.
In fact, this building is just as energy-efficient as the first, but that is the side effect of a broader and more complex design goal: to create a building that celebrates a range of cultural and natural pleasures – sun, light, air, nature, even food – in order to enhance the lives of the people who work there. During construction, certain elements of the second building did cost a little more. For example, windows that open are more expensive that do not. But the night-time cooling strategy cuts down on the need for air-conditioning during the day. Abundant daylight diminishes the need for fluorescent light. Fresh air makes the indoor spaces more pleasurable, a perk for current employees and a lure to potential ones – and thus an effect with economic as well as aesthetic consequences. (Securing and supporting a talented and productive workforce is one of a CFO’s primary goal, because the carrying cost of people – recruiting, employing and retaining them – is a hundred times as great as the carrying cost of an average building.) In its every element, the building expresses the client’s and architects’ vision of a life-centred community and environment. We know, because Bill’s (William McDonough, an architect and co-author of this excerpt from the book: Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things”) firm led the team that designed it.
We brought the same sensibility to designing a factory for Herman Miller, the office-furniture manufacturer. We wanted to give workers the feeling that they’d spent the day outdoors, unlike workers in the conventional factory of the Industrial Revolution, who might not see daylight until the weekend. The office and manufacturing space that we designed for Herman Miller were built for only 10 percent more money than it would have cost to erect a standard prefabricated metal factory building. We designed the factory around a tree-lined interior conceived as a brightly daylit “street” that ran the entire length of the building. There are rooftop skylights everywhere the workers are stationed, and the manufacturing space offers views of both the internal street and the outdoors, so that even as they work indoors, employees get to participate in the cycles of the day and the seasons. (Even the truck docks have windows.) The factory was designed to celebrate the local landscape and to invite indigenous species back to the site instead of scaring them away. Storm water and waste water are channelled through a series of connected wetlands that clean them, in the process lightening the load on the local river, which already suffers serious flooding because of the runoff from roofs, parking lots, and other impervious surfaces.
An analysis of the factory’s dramatic productivity gains has shown that one factor was “biophilia” – people’s love of the outdoors. Retention rates have been impressive. A number of workers who left for higher wages at a competitor’s factory returned in a few weeks. When asked why, they told the management they couldn’t work “in the dark”. They were young people who had entered the workforce only recently and had never worked in a “normal” factory before.
These buildings represent only the beginning of eco-effective design; they do not yet exemplify, in every way, the principle we espouse. But you might start to envision the difference between eco-efficiency and eco-effectiveness as the difference between an airless, fluorescent-lit grey cubicle and a sunlit area full of fresh air, natural views, and pleasant places to work, eat, and converse.
Peter Drucker has pointed out that it is a manager’s job to “do things right.” It is an executive’s job to make sure “the right things” get done. Even the most rigorous eco-efficient business paradigm does not challenge basic practices and methods: a shoe, building, factory, car, or shampoo can remain fundamentally ill-designed even as materials and processes involved in its manufacture become more “efficient.” Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things – on the right products and services and systems – instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them “right,” with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.
If nature adhered to the human model of efficiency, there are would be fewer cherry blossoms, and fewer nutrients. Fewer trees, less oxygen, and less clean water. Fewer songbirds. Less diversity, less creativity and delight. The idea of nature being more efficient, dematerializing, or even not “littering” (imagine zero waste or zero emissions for nature!) is preposterous. The marvellous thing about effective systems is that one wants more of them, not less.
Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. Negligence is described as doing the same thing over and over even though you know it is dangerous, stupid or wrong. Now that we know, it’s time for a change. Negligence starts tomorrow.
Michael Braungart and William McDonough, Cradle to Cradle-Remaking the Way We Make Things
What We Owe the Future:A Million Year View
By
William MacAskill
William MacAskill is an associate professor in philosophy and senior research fellow at the Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford. At the time of his appointment, he was the youngest associate professor of philosophy in the world. He has focused his research on moral uncertainty, effective altruism, and future generations. A TED speaker and past Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur, he has also cofounded the non-profits Giving What We Can, the Centre for Effective Altruism, and Y Combinator-backed 89,000 hours, which together have moved over UK Pounds 200 million to effective charities. He is the author of Doing Good Better and lives in Oxford.
Climate Change
So far, I have looked at catastrophe as a result of war or accidental release of engineered pathogens. But what about climate change – could it cause global civilization to collapse?
One cause for optimism is that we are making real progress on climate change: recent years have given more cause for hope than any other point in my lifetime. The International Energy Agency predicts that global coal use peaked in 2014 and is now in structural decline. The main reason for the decline in coal use to date is competition from cheap natural gas, but a more fundamental future shift is now under way. This is in significant part due to environmental activism, which has changed the climate prognosis in two ways.
First, thanks in part to youth activism, attention towards climate change has increased significantly, and several key players have made ambitious climate pledges, most notably China, which plans to reach zero emissions by 2060, and the European Union, which is aiming for 2050; and efforts are increasing at the state level in the United States.
Second, there has also been huge progress on key low-carbon energy technologies: solar, wind, and batteries.
Thanks to long-standing policy support from environmentally motivated governments, the cost of solar panels has fallen by a factor of 250 since 1976, while the cost of lithium-ion batteries has fallen by a factor of 41 since 1991. Even though solar and wind supply only around 3 percent of energy today, if the exponential cost declines continue, in twenty years they will supply a substantial fraction of global energy. Similarly, in the next few years, the total cost of ownership for electric cars – including purchase, fuel, and maintenance costs – is projected to drop below that of petrol and diesel cars.
However, we shouldn’t get complacent. There is a substantial chance that our decarbonisation efforts will get stuck. First, limited progress on decarbonisation is exacerbated by a breakdown in international coordination, which could happen because of rising military tensions between the major economies of the world. Decarbonisation is truly a global problem: even if most regions stop emitting, emissions could continue for a long time if one region decides not to cooperate. Second, the risk of prolonged technological stagnation, which I discuss in the next chapter, would increase the risk that we do not develop the technology to fully decarbonise. These are not outlandish risks; I would put both risks at about one in three.
For the purposes of ascertaining civilisation collapse, let’s ask about the low-probability but worst-case climate scenario, in which we ultimately burn through all recoverable fossil fuels. (In higher-end estimates, these amount to three trillion tonnes of carbon, so if our emissions remain at current rates, this would take about three hundred years.) If we did so, there would likely be around 7 degrees of warming relative to the preindustrial period, and a one in six chance of 9.5 degrees of warming.
The effect of such extreme climate change is difficult to predict. We just do not know what the world would be like if it were more than 7 degrees warmer; most research has focused on the impact of less than five degrees. Warming of seven to ten degrees would do enormous harm to countries in the tropics, with many poor agrarian countries being hit by severe heat stress and drought. Since these countries have contributed the least to climate change, this would be a colossal injustice.
But it’s hard to see how even this could lead to civilisational collapse. For example, one pressing concern about climate change is the effect it might have on agriculture. Although climate change would be bad for agriculture in the tropics, there is scope for adaptation, temperate regions would not be as badly damaged, and frozen land would be freed up at higher latitudes. There is a similar picture for heat stress. Outdoor labour would become increasingly difficult in the tropics because of heat stress, which would be disastrous for hotter and poorer countries with limited adaptive capacity. But richer countries would be able to adapt, and temperate regions would emerge relatively unscathed.
What about feedback loops, where some amount of warming leads to further warming? Two possibilities that have been raised are “moist greenhouse” and “runaway greenhouse” effects. In both scenarios, temperatures become so hot that the oceans are lost to space, as has occurred on Venus. But the existing models suggest that it is not possible to rigger a runaway greenhouse on Earth by burning fossil fuels. It also seems unlikely that we could trigger a moist greenhouse, but if carbon dioxide did cause a transition to a moist greenhouse state, carbon dioxide concentrations would naturally decline over hundreds of thousands of years, well before the earth’s water would be lost to space.
There are other possible feedback effects that look more concerning. In what is probably the most alarming climate science paper in recent years. One model found that once carbon dioxide concentrations reach about 1,300 parts per million, stratocumulus clouds will burn off and there will be eight degrees of warming over the course of years, on top of the six to seven degrees we will have already lived through. If we burn three trillion tonnes of carbon, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would reach around 1,600 parts per million, so this threshold is within reach.
This research is controversial, and scientists are divided on how plausible it is. Unfortunately, it is just difficult to know how great the risk of this kind of feedback is because carbon dioxide concentrations have not been greater than 1,300 parts per million for at least tens of millions of years. But even a low probability that there could be feedback effects of this sort should greatly concern us. It is hard to know what the impact of eight degrees of warming over a few years would be, and this question has not been researched by the scientific community. Climate instability is generally bad for agriculture, although my best guess is that global agriculture would still be possible, even during this extreme transition; even with fifteen degrees of warming, the heat would not pass lethal limits for crops in most regions. But it is hard to know exactly what would happen because such a change would be so extreme and so unprecedented. Possible nonlinear tipping points like this are, in my view, the greatest threat that climate change poses to our long-term future.
Even if climate change does not drastically increase the risk of civilisation collapse, it might well make it harder to recover from collapse caused by some other event, like a nuclear or biological war. For the reasons mentioned above, it seems that agriculture will still be possible even if there were high levels of warming. But it would mean that industrial civilisation would have to re-emerge in a warmer world than we faced historically, which should increase our uncertainty about our prospects for recovery.
Importantly, climate change lasts for a very long time: temperatures would be similar after ten thousand years and would only return to normal after hundreds of thousands of years. The sheer length of time before temperatures would return to current levels is long enough that, if climate change does delay recovery, almost all machines, tools, and buildings will have degraded: almost all books in libraries will have decayed; and knowledge passed down from one generation to another may have progressively gotten corrupted.
What To Do
When confronted with the empirical and evaluative complexity that faces us, it can be easy to feel clueless, as if there’s nothing at all we can do. But that would be too pessimistic. Even if we’re walking backwards into the future – and even if the terrain we’re walking on is unexplored, it’s dark and foggy, and we have few clues to guide us – nonetheless, some plans are smarter than others. We can employ three rules of thumb.
First, take actions that we can be comparatively confident are good. If we are exploring uncharted territory, we know that tinder and matches, a sharp knife, and first aid supplies will serve us well in a wide range of environments. Even if we have little idea what our expedition will involve, these things will be helpful.
Second, try to increase the number of options open to us. On an expedition, we would want to avoid getting stuck in a ravine we can’t get out of, and if we weren’t certain about the location of our destination, we would want to choose routes that leave open a larger number of possible paths. Third, try to learn more. Our expedition group could climb a hill in order to get a better view of the terrain or scout out different routes ahead.
These three lessons – take robustly good actions, build up options, and learn more – can help guide us in our attempts to positively influence the long term. First, some actions make the long-term future go better across a wide range of possible scenarios. For example, promoting innovation in clean technology helps keep fossil fuels in the ground, giving us a better chance of recovery after civilisation collapses; it lessens the impact of climate change; it furthers technological progress, reducing the risk of stagnation; and it has major near-term benefits too, reducing the enormous death toll from fossil fuel-based air pollution.
Second, some paths give us many more options than others. This is true on an individual level, where some career paths encourage much more flexible skills and credentials than others. Though I’ve been very lucky in my career, in general, a PhD in economics or statistics leaves open many more opportunities than a philosophy PhD. As I suggested in Chapter 4, keeping options open is important on a societal level too. Maintaining a diversity of cultures and political systems leaves open more potential trajectories for civilization; the same is true, to an even greater degree, for ensuring that civilization doesn’t end altogether.
Third, we can learn more. As individuals, we can develop a better understanding of the different causes I’ve discussed in this book and build up knowledge about relevant aspects of the world. Currently there are few attempts to make predictions about political, technological, economic, and social matters more than a decade in advance, and almost no attempts to look more than a hundred years ahead. As a civilization, we can invest resources into doing better – building mirrors that enable us to see, however dimly, into the future that lies behind us.
Career Choice
So far, I have looked at ways you can use your time and money to improve the long term. But by far the most important decision you will make, in terms of your lifetime impact, is your choice of career. Especially among young people, it has become increasingly common to strive for positive impact as a core part of one’s professional life rather than as a sideshow. More and more people don’t just want money to pay their bills; they also want a sense of purpose and meaning.
This is why, as a graduate student, I co-founded 80,000 Hours because that is roughly how many hours you have in your career: forty hours per week, fifty weeks per year, for forty years. Yet the amount of time people normally spend thinking about their career is tiny in comparison. When that’s combined with how poor existing career advice is, we end up with the outcome that a large proportion of people land in careers that are neither as fulfilling nor as impactful as they could be.
How, then, should you decide on a career? Again, we can return to our expedition metaphor. The three key lessons we identified were to learn more, build options, and take robustly good actions. These mirror the considerations that longtermists face when choosing a career:
1.Learn: Find low-cost ways to learn about and try out promising longer-term paths, until you feel ready to bet on one for a few years.
2.Build options: Take a bet on a longer-term path that could go really well (seeking upsides), usually by building the career capital that will most accelerate you in it. Butin case it doesn’t work out, have a backup plan to cap your downsides.
3.Do good: Use the career capital you’ve built to support the most effective solutions to the most pressing problems.
In reality, you’ll be pursuing all of these priorities throughout your career, but each one will get different emphasis at different stages. Learning will tend to be most valuable early in your career. Building your options by investing in yourself and accruing career capital is most valuable in the early to middle stages of your career. Making a bet on how to do good is most valuable in the mid to late stages of your career. But your emphasis might move back and forth over time. For instance, a forty-year-old who decides to make a dramatic career change might go back into learning mode for a few years. And you might be lucky enough to find yourself with opportunities to have an enormous positive impact right out of college; if so, this framework shouldn’t discourage you from doing that.
Clearing The Air: The Beginning and the End of Air Pollution
By Tim Smedley – 2019
Air pollution has overtaken poor sanitation and dirty water to become the number one environmental cause of premature death in the world. The latest estimate from the WHO is that approximately 4.2 million people die from outdoor air pollution annually, far greater than the number from HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and car crashes combined. According to WHO figures in 2018, nine out of ten people around the globe now breathe air containing high level of pollutants. UNICEF believes that two billion children live in areas where air pollution levels exceed the WHO air quality standards, while nearly 600,000 children under the age of five die annually from diseases caused or exacerbated by air pollution.
CFC’s are just the most well-known of the Frankenstein pollutants (sorry, the names stuck now). According to the Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health (2018), more than 140,000 new chemicals and pesticides have been synthesised since 1950. Of these, the 5,000 that are produced in greatest volume ‘have become widely dispersed in the environment and are responsible for nearly universal human exposure’ while fewer than half ‘have undergone any testing for safety or toxicity’…The UK Chief Medical Officer’s Report agrees that, ‘we only monitor a handful of the thousands of chemical, physical and biological pollutants that an individual will be exposed to over their life time.
Despite the ill effects of all the gases covered in the previous chapter, there is one category of air pollutant that stands head and shoulders above them all. And it’s not a gas. It’s a solid: particulate matter (PM). These are the tiny particles that float in the air, from road dust to soot, and cause the most damage to our health,…scientists define PM not by what they are made of (such as coal smoke, agricultural dust, engine fumes) but by size. The largest category, PM10, is any particle measuring 10 micrometres in diameter or below (roughly a tenth of the width of a human hair). Smaller PM2.5s are less than micrometres in diameter (a fortieth of the width of a human hair) And their little cousins the nanoparticles are below 0.1 micrometres (by which point the human hair comparison becomes a bit pointless). And broadly speaking, the smaller they are, the more effectively they destroy our health.
David Newby, professor of cardiology at the British Heart Foundation Centre of Research Excellence, began studying air pollution in the early 2000s. I spoke to him a lot for this book, and he is now one of the most prominent names in the field of the health effects of particulate pollution. But he admits that when he first started looking into this some 20 years ago, he presumed that the big chunky particles from black smoke were the worst offenders. ‘But actually, those sort of particles are big and coarse, and get lodged in the upper airways. The particles we are talking about now diffuse right down into the lungs…Cars generally produce PM2.5 and the majority [of these] are nanoparticles less than PM0.1 – that’s incredibly tiny. In these combustion particles you get metals, organic matter coated in petrol and diesel. It looks much like the tar coming out of smoker’s lungs – you see the same images as a result of [PM] pollution.
The drivers sitting in diesel vehicles are exposed to the worst does of all….’if you take a particle monitor inside a car, the levels are three times higher than outside. Often there are no cabin filters in the air circulation. The air inlets at the front of the car are usually taking in the exhausts of the car in front of you.’ The closer you are to the road, he says, ‘the more pollution you breathe’ and the car driver is obviously the closest of all….’it’s a well-known fact that if you’re driving through [a major road] you will get a higher dose than a cyclist or a pedestrian most of the time. Because you’re sitting in a bubble, you’re not getting the benefit of the air moving around you and diluting whatever pollution is around, you are essentially breathing air which is the exhaust of the car in front….So the guys who are producing the pollution are actually getting the highest dose…most people believe when they go inside their car and shut the door that the pollution is outside and they’re safe, but nothing could be further from the truth.’
‘Every parent who comes to me now is talking about [air pollution], Dr Ankit Parakh tells me in his consulting room. A pulmonologist in paediatric medicine at BLK Super Specialty Hospital, he is on the front line of Delhi’s smog epidemic. The BLK is one of several huge, privately owned hospitals that sprang up since the Indian economy liberalised in 1991 and, like so much in Delhi, the divide between the haves and have-nots is stark. Beggars, traders and rickshaws crowd around the hospital entrance and spill out into the road. Inside, the paediatric wing is full of kids with shiny Nike trainers and concerned parents tapping impatiently on smartphones. Most patients are here for breathing and respiratory disorders. Approximately one in three adults in Delhi and two in three children, have respiratory symptoms due to poor air quality.
The Columbia Centre for Children’s Environmental Health goes so far as to say that air pollution is the root cause of much of the ill health in childhood today. Young children breathe in more air than adults relative to body weight, meaning they are disproportionately affected by air pollutants compared to adults. Babies under the age of one tend to breathe 600 litres per kilo of body weight, per day. By the age of four, as we grow, it reduces to 450 litres; by age 12, it’s 300 litres; and by the age of 24 it plateaus at 200 litres per kilo per day and stays there for the rest of adulthood. When exposed to a polluted environment, children will therefore suffer the ill effects three times more acutely. Babies’ immune systems are also not fully developed and are more vulnerable to infections and almost defenceless against toxic exposure. Children are the first and worst victims of lead pollution too, because their bodies immaturity makes them most susceptible to neurological injury, leading to lower IQs, reading and learning disabilities, impaired hearing and behavioural problems including ADHD.
But it’s the effect on our cardiovascular system that is most fatal across the adult population. Yes, even more so than cancer or lung disease. Air pollution cause thinning arteries, blood clots, heart attacks and strokes. As fine nanoparticles enter the bloodstream through the walls of the lungs, they cause increased inflammation, resulting in changes in heart rate, heart rhythm and blood pressure. This is not just from chronic, long-term exposure, but also from short term.
If we actually manage to reach old age, then air pollution undermines our quality of life. In a study of the elderly in the United States, PM2.5 and NO2 exposures were significantly associated with type 2 diabetes. Associations between air pollution and serum glucose, a measure used to assess diabetes status, have been reported even with short-term NO2 and PM2.5 exposure. The same mechanisms that affect the young developing brain also set to work on diminishing brain function towards the end of life. Experimental studies have shown that air pollution cause neuro-inflammation, neuron damage and blood-brain barrier problems. …I talked to Jim Mills, MD of Air Monitors,…’Can you imagine what the political change of opinion would be if that gets proven?’ he said. ‘That all the problems we have with rising dementia in our population, which is one of the most scary things I think we face at the moment, are actually down to our use or overuse of the internal combustion engine producing these tiny particles?’
Even among elites [in Delhi], air pollution is an easier conversation to have if you can blame other people or, ideally, other countries. ‘In the boom years, say the late 1990s to around 2006-7’, says Dasgupta, [a Delhi-based author]‘young people started working in corporate jobs and earning five or ten times what their fathers had earned at the end of their careers, they had all these fancy cars, bought their parents cars, and encouraged their parents to think of consumption as a new thing…People who criticised this were treated with immense hatred…they didn’t want to be told that this engine of wealth creation was in any way morally suspect or harmful to anyone. And I think to some extent this is still the case. You have people living in totally privatised universes, you have these sealed vehicles and sealed homes…so if the air is getting worse {because of this}, it is not a very welcome conversation.
Simply planting more trees, plants and ivy are starting points for cities wanting to clear their air. But some are already thinking on a far more ambitious scale. Stefano Boeri is a Milan-based architect internationally known for his ‘vertical forest’ designs. Its an idea that has long been talked about in sustainability circles, but few have actually gone ahead and done it. Stefano has. The Bosco Verticale (vertical forest) is a pair of 27-storeyed residential towers in the Porto Nuova district of Milan. Officially opened in October 2014, the exteriors are planted with over 700 trees, 5,000 shrubs and 15,000 perennials and climbing plants; the buildings take up just 1,500 square metres of ground space, yet provide the neighbourhood with the equivalent of 20,000 square metres of forest and undergrowth. This is not just a few extra pots on balconies – the planting and irrigation have been integrated into the infrastructure and design of the building. Trees and shrubs – the largest single one was 9 metres (30ft) high, weighing 820 kg (1,800 lb) including soil, are irrigated with groundwater pulled up by a solar-powered pump system. In the hot Italian summer, heat inside the building is reduced by up to 30 [my note: it must be a typo, must be 3 degrees Centigrade] degrees Centigrade purely due to the vegetation, eliminating the need for air-conditioning, while any species of birds have nested on the trees including martins, redstarts and pale swifts.
Mexico imports 1.5 million cars from India per year. – [seemingly] every taxi or Uber is a Vento. The 1.5 million cars we import from India have a catalytic converter, because those are the standards for us to buy a car, from anywhere, and the catalytic converter has to have X, Y and Z standards. So that technology is built in India. But they don’t use it [in India], because they don’t have [the same regulatory] standard. They are also exporting petrol gasoline that doesn’t have sulphur, aluminium orlead, but they are not using it. Another economic own goal, noted by a report to the Indian Supreme Court in 2014, was that buses paid much more in road tax than cars, contributing to the boom of private taxi operators at the expense of bus companies.
The Whistle
By Benjamin Franklin
Franklin reminiscences when he was a small boy and paid too much for a whistle. He sure did learn how to strike a bargain, though.
To: Madame Brillon,
I received my dear friends two letters, one for Wednesday and one for Saturday. This is again Wednesday. I do not deserve one for today, because I have not answered the former. But, indolent as I am, and averse to writing, the fear of having no more of your pleasing epistles, if I do not contribute to the correspondence, obliges me to take up my pen; and as Mr B. has kindly sent me word that he sets out tomorrow to see you, instead of spending this Wednesday evening, as I have done its namesakes, in your delightful company, I sit down to spend it in thinking of you, in writing to you, and in reading over and over again your letters.
I am charmed with your description of Paradise, and with your plan of living their; and I approve much of your conclusion, that, in the meantime, we should draw all the good we can from this world. In my opinion, we might all draw more good from it than we do, and suffer less evil, if we would take care not to give too much for whistles. For to me it seems that most of the unhappy people we meet with are become so by neglect of that caution. You ask what I mean? You love stories, and will excuse my telling one of myself.
When I was a child of seven years old, my friends, on a holiday, filled my pocket with coppers. I went directly to a shop where they sold toys for children; and being charmed with the sound of a whistle, that I met by the way in the hands of another boy, I voluntarily offered and gave all my money for one. I then came home, and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle, but disturbing all the family. My brothers, and sisters, and cousins, understanding the bargain I had made, told me I had given four times as much for it as it was worth; put me in mind what good things I might have bought with the rest of the money; and laughed at me so much for my folly, that I cried with vexation; and the reflection gave me more chagrin than the whistle gave me pleasure.
This, however, was afterwards of use to me, the impression continuing on my mind; so that often, when I was tempted to buy some unnecessary thing, I said to myself, don’t give so much for the whistle; and I saved my money.
As I grew up, came into the world, and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle. When I saw one to ambitious of court favour, sacrificing his time in attendance on levees, his repose, his liberty, his virtue, and perhaps his friends, to attain it, I have said to myself, This man gives too much for his whistle.
When I saw another fond of popularity, constantly applying himself in political bustles, neglecting his own affairs, and ruining them by that neglect, He pays, indeed, said I, too much for his whistle.
If I knew a miser, who gave up every kind of comfortable living, all the pleasures of doing good to others, all the esteem of his fellow citizens, and the joys of benevolent friendship, for the sake of accumulating wealth, poor man, said I, you pay too much for your whistle. When I met with a man of pleasure, sacrificing every laudable improvement of the mind, or of his fortune, to mere corporal sensations, and ruining his health in their pursuit, Mistaken man, said I, you are providing pain for yourself, instead of pleasure, you give too much for your whistle. If I see one fond of appearance, or fine clothes, fine houses, fine furniture, fine equipages, all above his fortune, for which he contracts debts, and ends his career in prison, Alas! Say I, he has paid dear, very dear, for his whistle.
When I see a beautiful sweet-tempered girl married to an ill-natured brute of a husband, What a pity, say I, that she should pay so much for a whistle! In short, I conceive that great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.
Yet I ought to have charity for these unhappy people, when I consider that, with all this wisdom of which I am boasting, there are certain things in the world so tempting, for example, the apples of King John, which happily are not to be bought; for if they were put to sale by auction, I might very easily be led to ruin myself in the purchase. And find that I had once more given too much for the whistle. Adieu, my dear friend, and believe me ever yours very sincerely and with unalterable affection.
Am IRockin’& Rolling
Towards Enlightenment?
And what on earth does Zen
Have to do with Healthcare Facility Planning?
A young schizophrenic IIT’ian designing healthcare facilities for a living and trying to rock ‘n roll his way towards self-actualization.
Ever since I graduated from architecture school, I wanted to be a healthcare architect. Two reasons:
1. By then I had developed a taste for solving complex problems, and found healthcare architectural design to be such a problem.
2. I thought it would be of help to the society I lived in.
In hindsight, in the twilight of my life, I can see that I spent all of my architectural design career helping people who were already rich get even richer. Does this mean I was serving society? I don’t know, but I don’t think so.
I now see that the pressing architectural design issue during these years was not healthcare design but low-cost urban housing design. This was (and still is) a field that does not attract the better architects, because its clientele cannot afford their services. Maybe urban planning was another neglected design field. But I don’t know much about urban planning, I only know that Indian cities sorely lack it.
I feel the need to share these thoughts with the younger architects who are my readers.
Do something meaningful with your life!
Everyone makes money, you need to in order to survive. That won’t distinguish you, you should make good karma alongside.
You must find purpose; the means will follow…
An extract from an article in the New York Times:
“The goal should be not just to raise income levels, which studies show are increasingly disconnected from happiness, but also to build more stable and equitable societies in a slower-growth world. That requires investing to improve people’s lives: repairing ecosystems, rebuilding infrastructure and expanding housing. Doing so could also help create conditions for poorer nations to pursue export-led development on fairer and more predictable terms.
That wouldn’t automatically bring global stability, of course. New political conflicts would surely arise as this alternative future takes shape. But with the way things are going, it certainly seems worth a shot.”
Work, Death and Sickness
By Leo Tolstoy
There is a legend current among the South American Indians.
God, they say, at first made men so that they had no need to work: they needed neither houses, or clothes, nor food, and they all lived till they were a hundred, and did not know what illness was.
When, after some time, God looked to see how people were living, he saw that instead of being happy in their life, they had quarrelled with one another, and, each caring for himself, had brought matters to such a pass that far from enjoying life, they cursed it.
Then God said to himself: ‘This comes of their living separately, each for himself.’ And to change this state of things, God so arranged matters that it became impossible for people to live without working. To avoid suffering from cold and hunger, they were now obliged to build dwellings, and to dig the ground, and to grow and gather fruits and grain.
‘Work will bring them together,’ thought God. ‘They cannot make their tools, prepare and transport their timber, build their houses, sow and gather their harvest, spin and weave, and make their clothes, each one alone by himself.’
‘it will make them understand that the more heartily they work together, the more they will have and the better they will live; and this will unite them.’
Time passed on, and again God came to see how men were living, and whether they were now happy.
But he found them living worse than before. They worked together (that they could not help doing), but not all together, being broken up into little groups. And each group tried to snatch work from other groups, and they hindered one another, wasting time and strength in their struggles, so that things went ill with them all.
Having seen this, too, was not well, God decided so as to arrange things that man should not know the time of his death, but might die at any moment; and he announced this to them.
‘Knowing that each of them may die at any moment,’ thought God, ‘they will not, by grasping at gains that may last so short a time, spoil the hours of life allotted to them.’
But it turned out otherwise. When God returned to see how people were living, he saw that their life was bad as ever.
Those who were strongest, availing themselves of the fact that men might die at any time, subdued those who were weaker, killing some and threatening others with death. And it came about that the strongest and their descendants did no work, and suffered from the weariness of idleness, while those who were weaker had to work beyond their strength, and suffered from lack of rest. Each set of men feared and hated the other. And the life of man became yet more unhappy.
Having seen all this, God, to mend matters, decided to make use of one last means; he sent all kinds of sickness among men. God thought that when all men were exposed to sickness they would understand that those who are well should have pity on those who are sick, and should help them, that when they themselves fall ill those who are well might in turn help them.
And again God went away, but when He came back to see how men lived now that they were subject to sickness, he saw that their life was worse ever than before. The very sickness that in God’s purpose should have united men, had divided them more than ever. Those men who were strong enough to make others work, forced them to also to wait on them in times of sickness; but they did not, in their turn, look after others who were ill. And those who were forced to work for others and look after when sick, were so worn with work that they had no time to look after their own sick, but left them without attendance. That the sight of sick folk might not disturb the pleasures of the wealthy, houses were arranged in which these poor people suffered and died, far from those whose sympathy might have cheered them, and in the arms of hired people who nursed them without compassion, or even with disgust. Moreover, people considered many of the illnesses infectious, and, fearing to catch them, not only avoided the sick, but even separated themselves from those who attended the sick.
Then God said to Himself: ‘Even if this means will not bring men to understand wherein their happiness lies, let them be taught by suffering.’ And God left men to themselves.
And left to themselves, men lived long before they understood that they all ought to, and might be, happy. Only in the very latest times have a few of them begun to understand that work ought not to be a bugbear to some and like galley-slavery for others, but should be a common and happy occupation, uniting all men. They have begun to understand that with death constantly threatening each of us, the only reasonable business of every man is to spend the years, months, hours and minutes, allotted him – in unity and love. They have begun to understand that sickness, far from dividing men should, on the contrary, give opportunity for loving union with one another.
As healthcare architects our most important design factor should be compassion; how to further loving union with one another. The hospital building, its surroundings, and its staff should radiate unity and love.
Architects Solving Problems Created By Themselves
I have seen so much of this happening in my career, that it’s not funny. It is a consequence of client foolishness combined with architectural design immaturity.
It usually has its origin in rushing to put pencil to paper without giving enough thought to pre-design planning.
The first meeting with the client, usually to get the brief from him, is usually a waste of time. The designer should perfunctorily go through the brief, then put it aside, and try to understand why the client wants what he wants. It should be a psychoanalysis session, with the designer guiding it.
You will usually find that the client has based his wish list on trying to replicate a conglomeration of hospital buildings he has worked in in the past. In the profession, we have a term to describe this. More of the same. Rarely will you find a client who wants something that’s further from him than the tip of his nose. If the client is elderly and a successful doctor, God help you. He will describe the way hospitals worked throughout his life, and will be adamant that he has the latest views on hospital design.
Most architects love this. They have a detailed brief, an acquired site and a gung-ho client. The preliminaries can be completed in the very first three meetings, and then the advance payment cheques wing their way to the bank. And pencil meets paper. BOOM.
Here’s the bad news: There’s much to do before the pencil meets paper, namely predesign planning. The site needs to be analysed in the framework of all the municipal rules/regulations applicable to it. In an astonishingly large number of potential projects, the client has not even determined these rules, let alone applied them to the site.
The client may not even have surveyed the site, but expects the architect to start work on the basis of legal papers, with a site plan admeasuring two inches by two inches, in hard copy, drawn by a draftsman in a government office, with the dimensions written in the local language. That’s nothing short of ridiculous and can be possibly disastrous.
It is just too much to request the client to do a soil investigation on the potential site before buying it. The structure of the hospital below the ground, with bad soil, can possibly cost the client a tidy, unexpected sum, throwing the financial planning into palpitations. Many large hospitals nowadays are planned with three basement floors. But I guess doctors are inured to burying their mistakes.
The single biggest design factor that affects the form of the design solution is the size, shape and orientation of the site (and when I say site, I mean together with the municipal bylaws that it carries as its baggage.)
I fully understand that the three major qualifications for the success of a hospital are location, location, and location. I would like to qualify this statement. I’m saying, up to a point.
Sometimes, if there is no development on neighbouring plots, your site can eat into that land. While I designed the Asian Heart Institute at Bandra Kurla Complex, I did just that. Other unsuitable sites in densely packed urban areas cause their project to die with not even a whimper. While it’s a financial (and physical) drawback, there can be financial and physical solutions, if a financial and physical case can be made for them, inclusive of abandoning the land. A mistake should be acknowledged and acted upon, not compounded.
A project I was very briefly involved with in Indore, a Satya Sai Baba funded charitable Paediatric Cardiac Hospital, was given, by the city, a large piece of land abutting Indore airport, and it was in the flight funnel. We could only go G+1 floors. This was news to the trustees. To cut a long story short, they were allotted another better, but smaller piece of land, largely upon my insistence.
Another aspect to check is the number of parking spaces that can be provided. The requirements as per bylaws are often exorbitant, but can be relaxed by payment of a large fine for each less parking space provided. Maybe that’s why the concerned authorities mandate unrealistically high numbers? It’s all about what? The money, honey!
I would advise all of you potential clients to engage your architect’s services before buying the land. The payoff will be in spades!
Books As Birds
Below is a quote from a book I am reading:
But he would continuously change them around, according to his studies and tastes of the moment, for he considered books as rather like birds which it saddened him to see caged or motionless.
Italo Calvino – Baron In the Trees – Our Ancestors
It is the destiny of books to be read. When a reader picks up a book, she fulfils the intention of the author.
God did not create authors to write books that sit on a shelf gathering dust and propping up the ego of the owner.
In fact, I doubt whether books can be owned at all. When we pay for them, we borrow them, and “own” them only until they find another reader, who then borrows them from us.
Like birds, books complete their purpose when they fly. 🙂
I consider Italo Calvino’s best book to be “If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller”, and would recommend it to all of you. It’s short and very readable, unlike his other books, some of which bend your mind. Like the one quoted from above. After reading two of the three stories it contains, I am giving it a break, and embarking on “The Mission Song”, one of the few John Le Carre books that I haven’t yet read.
Ethics for Architects: 50 Dilemmas of Professional Practice
By Thomas Fisher
Introduction
I began my architectural career with an ethical dilemma, when a firm agreed to let me work for them – for free. Still in school, I needed money, but I also needed the experience, and so I accepted their offer, aware of the unfairness of it, not only to me but also to others who could not agree to such terms because they depended on summer jobs to pay for their education. That experience introduced me to the way architectural offices worked, and it also initiated my interest in the ethics of professional practice, which led to this book.
Like most people, architects want to do the right thing. That is often easier said than done, however, as I show in the case studies that follow, which are based on situations that I have encountered directly or have heard of from colleagues. In each case I try to sort out the most appropriate response, drawing from the four major approaches to Western ethics: what it means to be a good person (virtue ethics) or to have a good society (contract ethics), and what is the right action in terms of the individual (duty ethics) or the group (utilitarian ethics) A tabulation of the four approaches might look like this:
Good CharacterRight Action
IndividualVirtue ethicsDuty ethics
GroupContract ethicsUtilitarian ethics
These four approaches to ethics relate to four of the phases of architectural projects: pursuing and attaining the commission, assembling the team and signing the contract, developing the design and contract documents, and administering the construction and close-out of the project. Although all phases of an architectural project can raise a diversity of ethical dilemmas, each phase tends to draw more heavily on one approach to ethics more than others.
The gaining of a commission often depends as much on the character of the architect and the chemistry between the client and the designer as on anything that the firm has already built. Here, virtue ethics, with its emphasis on character traits such as honesty, integrity, and fairness, can make the difference between an architect and client developing a good working relationship or not.
Upon receipt of a commission, though, the architect’s command of contract ethics becomes more important. The negotiation of the rights and responsibilities of different parties, the heart of social contract theory, plays itself out in the agreements between architects and clients, as well as those between architects and consultants. Doing this well, without antagonizing others or disadvantaging ourselves, makes all the difference between good and bad relations in a project.
The design and contract document phase demands yet another approach, duty ethics, with its focus on good intentions. Design, as we have discovered in school, is almost entirely about intentions, about which Immanuel Kant urged us to ask: Have we treated as ends in themselves or simply as a means to our ends? Likewise, during the detailing of projects, we should ask ourselves how reasonable and attainable a solution to a problem might be. Is it, as Kant would ask, universally valid or not?
Then, as the project progresses into construction, utilitarian ethics become increasingly relevant. As we administer that process and bring the project to a close, we need to ask questions about the consequences of what we have created. Has the project benefited the greatest number of people, and has it addressed their pragmatic needs?
If ethics has relevance to every part of an architectural project, so too does it relate to every part of the architectural curriculum, even though the discussion of ethics too often gets relegated to just the professional practice course. This undervaluing of ethics has skewed the way we view our responsibilities. Too many architects, for example, rarely return to their buildings to conduct post-occupancy evaluations to assess the long-term effects of design decisions, revealing a certain blindness in our profession to the utilitarian demand that we attend to the consequences of what we do. Likewise, too many of us excuse the egomania of our most honoured colleagues, showing how little we care about virtue in our profession, with its emphasis on good character as the basis for doing good work. Nor has our profession been particularly politically active, putting relatively little of our leverage behind changing the unfair economic structures and social contracts within which we operate and to which our buildings often provide support. At the same time, the scrutiny we place on the intention of students in studio and architects in practice indicates how much duty ethics has pervaded our discipline.
Over the last century, we have created a lot of “architecture of good intentions,” as Colin Rowe observed, while paying relatively little attention to the character of our colleagues, to the nature of our social contract, or to the consequences of what we have built. Extending our appreciation of ethics beyond good intentions to include other approaches – virtue, contract, and utilitarian ethics – remains one goal of this book. Extending the scope of our ethical obligations is another. Our responsibilities as architects need to go beyond our direct obligations to clients, communities, colleagues, and co-workers. The sustainability movement has revealed how much of what we do affects the public at large and those only indirectly affected by our decisions, as well as future generations and other species. That may sound so expansive as to make ethical decision-making seem almost impossible: How can we account for our effect on those we will never meet?
The answer to such a question demands a particularly important skill we learn in school: imagining what most people cannot yet envision. The empathic projection of how a decision will affect others over time remains one of the great values architects bring to problems, and applying ability to ethical dilemmas offers a way to think about ethics across a wide range of social, spatial, and temporal scales.
Practical reasons exist for thinking about ethics this way. We can no longer afford to exclude other people, species from our ethical deliberations because, having done so in the past, we have begun to exhaust resources that we depend on, to extinguish species essential to our own health, and to exacerbate climate changes that threaten our very survival. We can no longer view the planet, and its many cultures, species, and generations as externalities beyond inclusion in our moral calculations. Unless we start taking the good of all into account, we will have very little good left at all.
In that light, architectural education and practice would not only benefit from a greater understanding of ethics but also might benefit ethics itself. An architect’s ability to think simultaneously at many different scales and to assess the value of alternatives that do not yet exist could broaden the scope of ethics, while also helping people find the most appropriate responses to the ethical dilemmas we encounter in life. Most unethical behaviour stems from people seeing their world and their own interests too narrowly. Once they recognize how much each of us affect and are in turn affected by myriad others, it becomes clear that the most ethical path is also almost always the most practical, the most economical, and ultimately the most sustainable way forward.
This book has six chapters, following the six canons of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) code of ethics and Professional Conduct, published by the AIA general Council (Washington, D.C., 2008):
- General Obligations
- Obligations to the Public
- Obligations to the Client
- Obligations to the Profession
- Obligations to colleagues
- Obligations to the Environment
The first five canons exist in order of scale, starting with the most general obligations and continuing to those that affect the greatest number of people, the public. To the fewest number, colleagues and co-workers. The sixth canon, a newcomer, addresses the environment, which covers the broadest scale of all, that of the entire planet. Since none of the other obligations makes a difference if we no longer have an environment that can support us, you could read this book from back to front, starting with the environmental cases at the end.
The AIA’s code encompasses all four approaches to ethics. Its canons invoke virtue ethics to urge architects to “maintain and advance their knowledge…exercise unprejudiced and unbiased judgement…(and) respect the rights…of their colleagues.” Contract ethics appears in such statements as “members should embrace the spirit and letter of the law…promote and serve the public interest…(and) serve their clients competently.” Duty ethics appears in lines like ‘[members should] exercise learned and uncompromised professional judgement…[and] uphold the integrity and dignity of the profession.” Finally, we hear a utilitarian focus on consequences when we read that members should “thoughtfully consider the social and environmental impact of their professional activities.”
An ethical code, however well framed and stated, matters only if those bound by it also enact it in their daily lives. No professional code of conduct can substitute for each one of us to lead as ethically responsible a life as we can, seeing every dilemma we encounter as an opportunity to ask what constitutes the right thing to do, what will achieve the greater good, and what virtues must come into play. Ethics, as Aristotle observed, must become a habit, so that we condition ourselves to the right kind of response to a situation, particularly when tempted by the often easier, unethical path. It may seem simpler to take a shortcut or take advantage of others. But such behaviour always costs us dearly in the long run.
Unethical behaviour is especially costly to professionals, whose real value and only true currency rests with our reputations and the respect and regard that others have for us. Every unethical act, every lapse in our character or betrayal of others’ trust, constitutes a self-inflicted injury that can take much longer to repair than anything that we think we might have gained. As I hope you will see by reading this book, the ethics of architectural practice is really about whether we can sustain a practice at all. Good values, in other words, create the greatest value, and embodying that in everything we do needs to become such a habit that we no longer need to read books like this. Until then, I hope the examples that follow prove as helpful to you to read as they were for me to write.
Mumbai & A Cyclonic Storm
Uncanny and Improbable Events
By
Amitav Ghosh
Amitav Ghosh (b. 1956) is an award-winning novelist and critic whose works have illuminated the shortcomings of prevailing cultural narratives about the climate crisis.
In this personal and wide-ranging exploration of how our collective imaginations fail to grasp the scale of environmental destruction, Ghosh summons writers and novelists to confront the most urgent story of our times.
What might happen if a Category 4 or 5 storm, with 150 mph or higher wind speeds, were to run directly into Mumbai? Mumbai’s previous encounters with powerful cyclones occurred at a time when the city had considerably less than a million inhabitants; today it is the second-largest municipality in the world with a population of over 20 million. With the growth of the city, it’s built environment has also changed so that weather that is by no means exceptional often has severe effects: monsoon downpours, for instance, often lead to flooding nowadays. With an exceptional event the results can be catastrophic.
One such occurred on July 26, 2005, when a downpour without precedent in Mumbai’s recorded history descended on the city: the northern suburbs received 94.4 cm of rain in fourteen hours, one of the highest rainfall totals ever recorded anywhere in a single day. On that day, with catastrophic suddenness, the people of the city with the costs of three centuries of interference with the ecology of an estuarine location.
The remaking of the landscape has so profoundly changed the area’s topography that its natural drainage channels are now little more than filth-clogged ditches. The old waterways have been so extensively filled in, diverted, and built over that their carrying capacity has been severely diminished.; and the water bodies, swamplands, and mangroves that might have served as natural sinks have also been encroached upon to a point where they have lost much of their absorptive ability.
A downpour so extreme as that of July 26 would prove a challenge even to a very effective drainage system: Mumbai’s choked creeks and rivers were wholly inadequate to the onslaught. They quickly overflowed causing floods in which water was mixed with huge amounts of sewerage as well as dangerous industrial effluents. Roads and rail tracks disappeared under waist-high and even chest-high floodwaters; in the northern part of the city, where the rainfall was largely concentrated, entire neighbourhoods were inundated: 2.5 million people ‘were under water for hours together.’
On weekdays Mumbai’s suburban railway network transports close to 6.6 million passengers; buses carry more than 1.5 million. The deluge came down on a Tuesday, beginning at around 2 p.m. Local trains services were soon disrupted, and by 4.30 p.m. none were moving; several arterial roads and intersections were cut off by floodwaters at about the same time. The situation worsened as more and more vehicles poured onto the roads; in many parts of the city traffic came to a complete standstill. Altogether two hundred kilometers of road were submerged.; some motorists drowned in their cars because short-circuited electrical systems would not allow them to open doors and windows. Thousands of scooters, motorcycles, cars, and buses were abandoned on the water-logged roads.
At around 5 p.m. cellular networks failed; most landlines stopped working too. Soon much of the city’s power supply was also cut off (although not before several people had been electrocuted): parts of the city would remain without power for several days. Two million people, including many school children, were stranded, with no means of reaching home; a hundred and fifty thousand were jammed into the city’s two major railway stations. Those without money were unable to withdraw cash because ATM services had been knocked out as well.
Road, rail and air services would remain cut off for two days. Over five hundred people died: many were washed away in the floods; some were killed in a landslide. Two thousand residential buildings were partially or completely destroyed; more than ninety thousand shops, schools, health care centres, and other buildings suffered damage.
While Mumbai’s poor, especially the inhabitants of some of its informal settlements, were among the worst affected. The most powerful politician in the city had to be rescued from his home in a fishing boat; many Bollywood stars and industrialists were stranded or trapped by flood waters.
Through all of this the people of Mumbai showed great generosity and resilience, sharing food and water and opening up their homes to strangers. Yet, as one observer notes, on July 26, 2005, it became clear to many million people in Mumbai that life may never quite be the same again. An exceptional rainstorm finally put to rest the long prevailing myth of Mumbai’s indestructible resilience to all kinds of shocks, including that of the partition.
In the aftermath of the deluge, many recommendations were made by civic bodies, NGOs and even the courts. But ten years later, when another downpour occurred on June 10, 2015, it turned out that few of the recommended measures had been implemented: even though the volume of rainfall was only a third of that of the deluge of 2005, many parts of the city were again swamped by floodwaters.
What does Mumbai’s experience of the downpour of 2005 tell us about what might, or might not, happen if a major storm happens to hit the city? The events will, of course, unfold very differently: to start with, a cyclone will arrive not with a few hours’ notice, as was the case with the deluges, but after a warning period of several days. Storms are now so closely tracked from the time they form onward, that there is usually an interval of a few days when emergency measures can be put in place.
Of these emergency measures, probably the most effective is evacuation. In historically cyclone-prone areas, like eastern India and Bangladesh, systems have been set up to move millions of people away from the coast when a major storm approaches; these measures have dramatically reduced casualties in recent years. But the uptick in cyclonic activity in the Arabian Sea is so recent that there has yet been no need for large-scale evacuations on the subcontinent’s west coast. Whether such evacuations could be organized is an open question. Mumbai has been lucky not to have been hit by a major storm in more than a century; perhaps for that reason the possibility appears not to have been taken adequately into account in planning for disasters. Moreover, here ‘as in most megacities, disaster management is focused on post-disaster response.
In Mumbai disaster planning seems to have been guided largely by concerns about events that occur with little or no warning, like earthquakes and deluges: evacuations usually follow rather than precede disasters of this kind. With a cyclone, given a lead-up period of several days, it would not be logistically impossible to evacuate large parts of the city before the storm’s arrival: it’s rail and port facilities would certainly be able to move millions of people to safe locations on the mainland. But in order to succeed, such an evacuation would require years of planning and preparation; people in at-risk areas would also need to be educated about the dangers to which they might be exposed. And that exactly is the rub – for in Mumbai, as in Miami and many other coastal cities, these are often the very areas in which expensive new construction projects are located. Property values would almost certainly decline if residents were to be warned of possible risks – which is why builders and developers are sure to resist efforts to disseminate disaster-related information. One consequence of the last two decades of globalization is that real estate interests have acquired enormous power, not just in Mumbai but around the world; very few civic bodies, especially in the developing world, can hope to prevail against construction lobbies, even where it concerns public safety. The reality is that ‘growth’ in many coastal cities around the world now depends on ensuring that a blind eye is turned towards risk.
Even with extensive planning and preparation the evacuation of a vast city is a formidable task, and not only for logistical reasons. The experience of New Orleans, in the days before Hurricane Katrina, or of New York before Sandy, or the city of Tacloban before Haiyan, tells us that despite the most dire warnings large numbers of people will stay behind; even mandatory evacuation orders will be disregarded by many. In the case of a megacity like Mumbai this means that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will find themselves in harm’s ways when a cyclone makes landfall. Many will no doubt assume that having dealt with the floods of the recent past they will also be able to ride out a storm.
But the impact of a Category 4 or 5 cyclone will be very different from anything that Mumbai has experienced in living memory. During the deluges of 2005 and 2015 rain fell heavily on some parts of the city and lightly on others: the northern suburbs bore the brunt of the rainfall in both cases. The effects of the flooding were also most powerfully felt in low-lying areas and by the residents of ground-level houses and apartments; people living at higher elevations, and on the upper stories of tall buildings, were not as badly affected.
But the winds of a cyclone will spare neither low nor high; if anything, the blast will be felt most keenly by those at higher elevations. Many of Mumbai’s tall buildings have large glass windows; few, if any are reinforced. In a cyclone these exposed expanses of glass will have to withstand, not just hurricane-strength winds, but also flying debris. Many of the dwellings in Mumbai’s informal settlements have roofs made of metal sheets and corrugated iron; cyclone-force winds will turn these, and the thousands of billboards that encrust the city, into deadly projectiles, hurling them with great force at the glass-wrapped towers that soar above the city.
Nor will a cyclone overlook those parts of the city that were spared the worst of the floods; to the contrary they will probably be hit first and hardest. The cyclones that have struck the west coast of India in the past have all travelled upward on a north-easterly tack, from the southern quadrant of the Arabian Sea. A cyclone moving in this direction would run straight into south Mumbai, where many essential civic and national institutions are located.
The southernmost tip of Mumbai consists of a tongue of low-lying land, much of it reclaimed; several important military and naval installations are located there, as is one of the country’s most important scientific bodies – the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. A storm surge of two or three meters would put much of this area under water, single-story buildings may be submerged almost to the roof. And an even higher surge is possible.
Not far from here lie the areas in which the city’s most famous landmarks and institutions are located: most notably, the iconic Marine Drive, with its sea-facing hotels, famous for their sunset views, and it’s necklace-like row of art deco buildings. All of this sits on reclaimed land; at high tide waves often pour over the seawall. A storm surge would be barely impeded as it swept over and advanced eastward.
A distance of about four kilometers separates south Mumbai’s two sea-facing shorelines. Situated on the east side are the city’s port facilities, the legendary Taj Mahal Hotel, and the plaza of the Gateway of India, which is already increasingly prone to flooding. beyond lies a much-used fishing port: any vessels that had not been moved to safe locations would be seized by the storm and swept toward the Gateway of India and the Taj Hotel.
At this point waves would be pouring into south Mumbai from both its sea-facing shorelines; it is not inconceivable that the two fronts of the storm surge would meet and merge. In that case the hills and promontories of south Mumbai would once again become islands, rising out of a wildly agitated expanse of water. Also visible above the waves would be the upper stories of the city’s most important institutions: the Town Hall, the state legislature, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminus, the towering headquarters of the Reserve Bank of India, and the skyscraper that houses India’s largest and most important stock exchange.
Much of south Mumbai is low lying; even after the passing of the cyclone many neighbourhoods would probably be waterlogged for several days; this will be true of other parts of the city as well If the roads and rail lines are cut for any length of time, food and water shortages may develop, possibly leading to civil unrest. In Mumbai waterlogging often leads to the spread of illness and disease: the city’s health infrastructure was intended to cater to a population of half it’s present size; it’s municipal hospitals have only forty thousand beds. Since many hospitals will have been evacuated before the storm, it may be difficult for the sick and injured to get medical attention. If Mumbai’s stock exchange and reserve Bank are rendered inoperative, then India’s financial and commercial systems may be paralysed.
But there is another possibility, yet more frightening. Of the world’s megacities, Mumbai is one of the few that has a nuclear facility within it’s urban limits: the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre at Trombay. To the North, at Tarapur, ninety-four kilometers from the city’s peripheries, lies another nuclear facility. Both these plants sit right on the shoreline, as do many other nuclear installations around the world: these locations were chosen in order to give them easy access to water.
With climate change many nuclear plants around the world are now threatened by rising seas. An article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists notes: ‘During massive storms…there is a greatly increased chance of the loss of power at a nuclear power plant, which significantly contributes to safety risks.’ Essential cooling systems could fail; safety systems could be damaged; contaminants could seep into the plant and radioactive water could leak out, as happened at the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
What threats might a major storm pose for nuclear plants like those in Mumbai’s vicinity? I addressed this question to a nuclear safety expert, M. V. Ramana, of the Program on Science and Global Security at Princeton University. His answer was as follows: “My biggest concerns have to do with the tanks in which liquid radioactive waste is stored. These tanks contain, in high concentrations, radioactive fission products and produce a lot of heat due to radioactive decay; explosive chemicals can also be produced in these tanks, in particular hydrogen gas. Typically, waste storage facilities include several safety systems to prevent explosions. During major storms, however some or all of these systems could be simultaneously disabled: cascading failures could make it difficult for workers to carry out any repairs – this is assuming that there will be any workers available and capable of undertaking repairs during a major storm. An explosion at such a tank, depending on the energy of the explosion and the exact weather conditions, could lead to the dispersal of radioactivity over hundreds of square kilometers; this in turn could require mass evacuations or the long-term cessation of agriculture in regions of high contamination.
Fortunately, the chances of a cyclone hitting Mumbai are small in any given year. But there is no doubt whatsoever of the treats that will confront the city because of climate change impacts: increased precipitation and rising sea levels. If there are substantial increases in rainfall over the next few decades, as climate models predict, then damaging floods will become more frequent. As for sea levels, if they rise by a meter or more by the end of the century, as some climate scientists fear they might, then some parts of South Mumbai will gradually become uninhabitable.
A similar fate awaits two other colonial cities, founded in the same century as Mumbai: Chennai (Madras), which also experienced a traumatic deluge in 2015; and Kolkata, to which I have close familial links.
Unlike Chennai and Mumbai, Kolkata is not situated beside the sea. However, much of its surface area is below sea level, and the city is subject to regular flooding: like everyone who has lived in Kolkata, I have vivid memories of epic floods. But the long familiarity with flooding tends to have a lulling effect, which is why it came as a shock to me when I learned, from a World Bank report, that Kolkata is one of the global megacities that is most at risk from climate change; equally shocking was the discovery that my family’s house, where my mother and sister live, is right next to one of the city’s most threatened neighbourhoods.
The report forced me to face a question that eventually confronts everybody who takes the trouble to inform themselves about climate change: What can I do to protect my family and loved ones now that I know what lies ahead? My mother is elderly and increasingly frail; there is no telling how she would fare if the house were to be cut off by a flood and medical attention were to be cut off by a flood and medical attention were to become unavailable for any length of time.
After much thought I decided to talk to my mother about moving. I tried to introduce the subject tactfully, but it made little difference: she looked at me as though I had lost my mind. Nor could I blame her: it did seem like lunacy to talk about leaving a beloved family home, with all its memories and associations, simply because of a threat outlined in a World Bank report.
It was a fine day, cool and sunlit; I dropped the subject.
But the experience did make me recognize something that I would otherwise have been loath to admit: contrary to what I might like to think, my life is not guided by reason; it is ruled, rather, by the inertia of habitual motion. This is indeed the condition of the vast majority of human beings, which is why very few of us will be able to adapt to global warming if it is left to us, as individuals, to make the necessary changes; those who will uproot themselves and make the right preparations are precisely those obsessed monomaniacs who appear to be on the borderline of lunacy.
If whole societies and polities are to adapt then the necessary decisions will need to be made collectively, within political institutions, as happens in wartime or national emergencies. After all, isn’t that what politics, in its most fundamental form, is about? Collective survival and the preservation of the body politic?
Yet, to look around the world today is to recognize that with some notable exceptions, like Holland and China, there exist very few polities or public institutions that are capable of implementing, or even contemplating a managed retreat from vulnerable locations. For most governments and politicians, as for most of us as individuals, to leave the places that are linked to our memories and attachments, to abandon the homes that have given our lives roots, stability, and meaning, is nothing short of unthinkable.
Ethics for Architects: 50 Dilemmas of Professional Practice
by
Thomas Fisher
Insensitivity
Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power – Lao tzu
The sole principal of an architectural read books on management with the goal of maximizing the firm’s profits and his own income. As a result, he continually restructured the company and redefined his staff’s job duties to achieve more efficiency and productivity. Despite all of his efforts at managing the firm well, however, the staff continued to leave for other jobs, and he had a difficult time attracting new employees. Nor did he ever come close to achieving the productivity and profit goals promised by the management books he read.
Managers often think that their primary task involves managing others and achieving the greatest productivity from their staff and profit from their operation. That may be what their job description says and what others expect of them, but it misses the most important and often overlooked responsibility of managers in an organization: managing themselves. This is much harder than it sounds. With power comes the temptation to use it to control others, and in most organizations this temptation becomes an expectation, since most managers are judged by how well they produce results. Indeed, the more managers push others as well as themselves to the extreme, the more often they are rewarded.
But over the long run, the more managers control their temptation to control others, the more successful they will be, all leaders, by virtue of their standing in an organization, have the strength to master others, as Lao-tzu put it, but very few have the real power that comes from mastering themselves. Ethics has much to offer in that regard. Few people read ethics as a guide to management – although a growing number of business books have made the connection between ethics and economic success – but the history of ethics provides plenty of tips about self-management. This includes virtue ethic’s emphasis on self-control, contract ethics concentrations on good intentions or consequences. In almost every ethical tradition, mastery of the self is an essential aspect of leading a good life.
We have seen, of late, what happens when managers lose sight of that. In pursuit of a life defined in terms of large salaries and lavish lifestyles, the top managers of investment banks fell under the illusion that they could control the extraordinary risks they took with other people’s money. If they faced any negative circumstances, it came from not pursuing extraordinary profits persistently enough. Self-control in such a climate would have been nothing short of self-destructive. We now know, of course, that such behavior also proved self-delusional, as the under-regulated investment banking industry imploded under the weight of so much uncontrolled greed. It produced what ethicists call “moral hazard,” since the banks faced no downside to their irresponsible behavior, having become so big that taxpayers had to bail them out.
At the heart of that financial collapse lay the mistaken idea that mastering others – whether it be their money, their lives, or their livelihoods – can succeed without first mastering ourselves. We think that successful people have the most knowledge, the inside scoop on how things work, but we learn from ethics that truly successful people have the greatest understanding that, as Lao-tzu argued, truth is paradoxical. Success and mastery come only when we succeed at mastering our own desire to succeed at all costs.
That is why the architect here never succeeds as a manager, despite all his efforts. He may know about management theories and techniques, but he had yet to learn to control his own desire to manage others and so ended up treating his employees as it they were objects on an organizational chart rather than people in search of wise leadership. As a result, the more he read about how to increase his staff’s productivity, the less success he had in finding and keeping a highly productive staff. Treating others as means to his end, as Immanuel Kant would say, made others want nothing more than to end their relationship with him and to prevent him from mistreating them.
Any success at the expense of others is no success at all. The only real success comes when we help others succeed, even when it comes at our own expense. Were this architect to spend more time listening to the staff about how he might help them achieve their goals, he would find that the productivity of his people and the profitability of his fir would rise as a result. In that light, ethics becomes central to a business’s success and essential to leading an organization, reminding us that the most successful managers, above all else, know themselves.
Sustainable Energy- Without the hot air
By
David JC MacKay
We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science.
James Lovelock
What’s this book about?
I’m concerned about cutting UK emissions of twaddle – twaddle about sustainable energy. Everyone says getting off fossil fuels is important, and we’re all encouraged to “make a difference,” but many of the things that allegedly make a difference don’t add up.
Twaddle emissions are high at the moment because people get emotional (for example about wind farms or nuclear power) and no-one talks about numbers. Or if they do mention numbers, they select them to sound big, to make an impression, and to score points in arguments, rather than to aid thoughtful discussion.
This is a straight-talking book about the numbers. The aim is to guide the reader around the claptrap to actions that really make a difference and to policies that add up.
This is a free book
I didn’t write this book to make money. I wrote it because sustainable energy is important. If you would like to have the book for free for your own use, please help yourself: it’s on the internet at www.withouthotair.com.
This is a free book in second sense: you are free to use all the material in this book, except for the cartoons and the photos with a named photographer, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share-Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales Licence. (The cartoons and photos are excepted because the authors have generally given me permission only to include their work, not to share it under a Creative Commons licence.) You are especially welcome to use my materials for educational purposes. My website includes separate high-quality files for each of the figures in the book.
Food and Climate Change- Without the hot air
By
S L Bridle
Preface
In 2015, when my children started school, I wondered about the future: what the world will be like for them in 2050, when they are my age. Around the same time my former mentor and friend David MacKay was diagnosed with terminal cancer. David had brought great clarity to the discussion of greenhouse gas emissions, especially through his brilliant book Sustainable Energy – Without the hot air, which greatly influences this book. In his absence, I started to research climate change and to wonder how it might impact the future, and what we can do about it. I now divide my time between food and my other research filed of astrophysics, as a Professor at the University of Manchester, UK.
I have immersed myself in the research literature on food and climate change to write the book I’d have liked to read at the beginning of the journey. As a practising physics researcher, I bring a balanced synthesis of the academic literature on this topic: asking basic quantitative questions about where foods come from, how much emissions they cause, why, and what can be done about it. As an inquisitive eater I discuss what we citizens can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food. But most of all I want you to benefit from the information in this book to help you figure out for yourself what you’re to do to help generations to come.
In all this, I am heavily influenced by David MacKay’s passion for empowering others to just get started working stuff out.
This book doesn’t promote a particular diet or set of food choices. Instead, it sets out clearly the scientific consensus on how individual foods contribute to climate change, and illustrates this with some typical example food combinations. There are no recipes in this book, although it examines some simplified common recipes from the internet and calculates their greenhouse gas emissions. By the end of the book, you will be able to apply what you’ve learned to your own favourite meals and recipes.
Throughout we visualize greenhouse-gas emissions using vertical bars or “stacks”: the height of a stack indicates the number of grams of emissions. Each stack is drawn to the same scale, so you can use the heights of different stacks to compare the relative amounts of emissions from different foods and activities. This approach draws heavily on the energy stacks in David MacKay’s Sustainable Energy – Without the hot air. David’s motto was “numbers not adjectives”: instead of vague descriptions like “huge” or “lots”, we need to quantify impacts and compare them numerically to get a useful analysis.
The main body of each chapter presents the information about a specific food as simply as possible. However, the world often isn’t as straightforward as we might like, so detailed numbers, calculations, discussions and references are included in the endnotes at the end of each chapter. You can use the endnotes to explore topics in depth, and see exactly how each emission figure has been calculated. (Some readers might prefer to skip over the endnotes on first reading.)
This is a world book, rather than being specific to any one country. Individual countries may differ in some details – depending on their climate, energy sources, etc. – but the information is valid for the world as a whole.
Errata: the latest list of changes, corrections (and interesting additions) for this book are online, accessed via the book’s page at www.uit.co.uk/without-the-hot -air
You can also get details of the free ebook version of this book, via the book’s page at www.uit.co.uk/without-the-hot-air
Continue the conversation at #FACCWTHA on Twitter.
The Doctor and The Saint
By
Arundhati Roy
“While janitors’ jobs in malls and in corporate offices with swanky toilets to do not involve ‘manual scavenging’ go to non-Dalits, there are (officially) 1.3 million people, mostly women, who continue to earn their living by carrying baskets of human shit on their heads as they clean traditional-style toilets that use no water. Though it is against the law, the Indian Railways is one of the biggest employers of manual scavengers. Its 14,300 trains transport twenty-five million passengers across 65,000 kilometers every day. Their shit is funnelled straight onto the railway tracks through 172,000 open discharge toilets. This shit, which must amount to several tonnes a day, is cleaned by hand, without gloves or any protective equipment, exclusively by Dalits. While the Prohibition of Employment as Manual scavengers and their Rehabilitation Bill, 2012, was cleared by the cabinet and by the Rajya Sabha in September 2013, the Indian Railways has ignored it. With deepening poverty and the steady evaporation of government jobs, a section of Dalits has to fiercely guard its ‘permanent’ state employment as hereditary shit-cleaners against predatory interlopers.”
“In 1947, in what must count as one of the most callous, iniquitous acts in history, the British government drew a hurried border through the country that cut through communities and people, villages and homes, with less care than it might have taken to slice up a leg of lamb.
Gandhi, the Apostle of Peace and Non-violence, lived to see the movement he thought he led dissolve into a paroxysm of genocidal violence in which half a million people (a million, according to Stanley Wolpert in A New History of India) lost their lives and almost twelve million lost their homes, their past and everything they had ever known. Through the horror of partition, Gandhi did all he could to still the madness and the bloodlust. He travelled deep into the very heart of the violence. He prayed, he pleaded, he fasted, but the incubus had been unleashed and could not be recalled. The hatred spilled over and consumed everything that came in its path. It continues to branch out, overground and underground, It has bequeathed the subcontinent a dangerous, deeply wounded psyche.
Amidst the frenzy of killing, ethnic cleansing and chest-thumping religious fundamentalism on both sides, the Government of Pakistan kept its head about one thing: it declared the Untouchable municipal sweepers were part of the country’s ‘essential services’ and impounded them, refusing them permission to move to India. (Who else was going to clean people’s shit in the Land of the Pure?) Ambedkar raised the matter with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in a letter in December 1947. With great difficulty Ambedkar managed to help at least a section of the ‘essential services’ get across the border. Even today in Pakistan, while various Islamic sects slaughter each other over who is the better, more correct, more faithful Muslim, there does not seem to be much of a heartache over the very un-Islamic practice of untouchability.”
To best understand and address the inequality in India today, Arundhati Roy insists we must examine both the political development and influence of M.K. Gandhi and why B.R. Ambedkar’s brilliant challenge to his near-divine status was suppressed by India’s elite. In Roy’s analysis, we see that Ambedkar’s fight for justice was systematically side-lined in favour of policies that reinforced caste, resulting in the current nation of India: independent of British rule, globally powerful, and marked to this day by the caste system.
This book situates Ambedkar’s arguments in their vital historical context-namely, as an extended public political debate with Mohandas Gandhi. ‘For more than half a century-throughout his adult life-[Gandhi’s] pronouncements on the inherent qualities of black Africans, untouchables and the labouring classes remained consistently insulting,’ writes Roy. ‘His refusal to allow working-class people and untouchables to create their own political organizations and elect their own representatives remained consistent too.’
In The Doctor and the Saint, Roy exposes some uncomfortable, controversial, and even surprising truths about the political thought and career of India’s most famous and most revered figure. In doing so she makes the case for why Ambedkar’s revolutionary intellectual achievements must be resurrected, not only in India but throughout the world.
A Personal View of Environmentalism
By
James Lovelock – We Belong to Gaia
The concept of Gaia, a living planet, is for me the essential basis of a coherent and practical environmentalism; it counters the persistent belief that the Earth is a property, an estate, there to be exploited for the benefit of humankind. This false belief that we own the Earth, or are its stewards, allows us lip service to environmental policies and programs but to continue with business as usual. A glance at any financial newspaper confirms that our aim is still growth and development. We cheer at any new discovery of gas or oil deposits and regard the current rise in petroleum prices as a potential disaster, not a welcome curb on pollution. Few, even among climate scientists and ecologists, seem yet to realize fully the potential severity, or the imminence, of catastrophic global disaster; understanding is still in the conscious mind alone and not yet the visceral reaction of fear. We lack an intuitive sense, an instinct, that tells us when Gaia is in danger.
So how do we acquire, or reacquire, an instinct that recognizes not only the presence of the great Earth system but also its state of health? We do not have much to go on because the concepts of intuition and instinct tended to be ignored, or at best regarded as flaky and dubious, during the last two centuries of triumphant reductionism. In the twenty-first century we are somewhat freer to wonder about ideas like instinct and intuition, and it seems probable that long ago in our evolutionary history, when our ancestors were simple aquatic animals, we had already evolved an ability instantly to distinguish anything alive within the mainly inorganic ocean. This primeval instinct would have been supremely important for survival, since living things can be either edible, lovable or lethal. It is likely to be part of our genetic coding and hard wired into our brains so that we still have it in full strength. We do not need a doctorate in biology to distinguish a beetle from a stone, or a plum from a pebble. But, because of the circumscribed nature of its origins, the instinctive recognition of life is limited by the range of our senses and does not work for things smaller or larger than we can see. We recognize a paramecium as alive, but only when we can see it through a microscope. Even biologists, when they think of the biosphere, too often ignore all things smaller than can be seen with the naked eye. My friend and collaborator Lynn Margulis more than anyone has stressed the primary importance of microorganisms in Gaia, and she summarizes her thoughts in the book she wrote in 1986 with Dorian Sagan, Microcosmos. The Earth was never seen as a whole until astronauts viewed it for us from outside, and then we saw something very different from our expectation of a mere planet-sized ball of rock existing within a thin layer of air and water. Some astronauts, especially those who travelled as far as the moon, were deeply moved and saw the Earth itself as their home. Somehow, we have to think like them and expand our instinctive recognition of life to include the Earth.
The ability instantly to recognize life, and other instincts, like the fear of heights and snakes, are part of our long evolutionary history, but there is another kind of instinct that is not innate but grows from childhood conditioning. The Jesuits discovered that a child’s mind could be molded to accept their faith, and that once done the child retained faith as an instinct throughout life; similar and different molds fix lifelong tribal and national loyalty. The mind of a child is even plastic enough to be shaped to follow faithfully something as trivial as a football team or as potentially sinister as a political ideology. Abundant experience of this kind suggests that we could, if we chose, make Gaia an instinctive belief by exposing our children to the natural world, telling them how and why it is Gaia in action, and showing that they belong to it.
The founders of the great religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism lived at times when we were far less numerous and lived in a way that was no burden to Earth. These holy men would have had no inkling of the troubled state of the planet a thousand or more years later, and their concern, rightly would have been for human affairs. Rules and guidance were needed for individual, family and tribal good behavior; we were the human family growing up in the natural world of Gaia and, like children, we took our home for granted and never questioned its existence. The success of these religious backgrounds is measured by their persistence as faiths and guides over more than a thousand years of further population expansion. When I was a child I was marinated in Christian belief, and still it unconsciously guides my thinking and behavior. Now we face the consequences of fouling our planetary home, and new hazards loom that are much more difficult to understand or cope with than the tribal and personal conflicts of the past. Our religions have not yet given us the rules and guidance for our relationship with Gaia. The humanist concept of sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.
Perhaps Christians need a new Sermon on the Mount that sets out the human constraints needed for living decently with the Earth, and which spells out the rules for its achievement. I have long wished that the religions and the secular humanists might turn to the concept of Gaia and recognize that human rights and needs are not enough; those with faith could accept the Earth as part of God’s creation and be troubled by its desecration.
Important concepts like God or Gaia are not comprehensible in the limited space of our conscious minds that is the seat of intuition. Our deep unconscious thoughts are not rationally; they emerge fully formed as our conscience and an instinctive ability to distinguish good from evil. Perhaps this is why the early Quakers knew that the still, small voice within does not come from conscious reckoning. Our conscious rational minds are no more capable of deep thought than is the tiny screen of a contemporary mobile telephone able to present in its full glory a Vermeer painting. The extraordinary power of our unconscious minds is expressed in what we see as mundane things like walking, riding a bicycle or catching a ball. We would fail utterly to do any of these things by conscious thought; their automatic and instinctive achievement requires long and often tedious training. The same is true of inventors who, after long apprenticeship to their craft, become inspired to imagine and then construct devices that reveal emergence when they are switched on; physicists in a similar way exploit the incredible mysteries of quantum phenomena despite having no conscious understanding.
The history of science shows that we need to keep what is good in past interpretation of the world and merge in new knowledge as it appears. Newton’s understanding enlightened physics for three hundred years. Einstein’s relativity did not cast out Newtonian physics, it extended it. In a similar way, Darwin’s great vision of evolution has raised biology from a cataloguing activity into a science, but we are now beginning to see Darwinism is incomplete. Evolution is not just a property of organisms – what evolves is the whole Earth system with its living and non-living parts existing as a tight coupled entity. It is foolish to think that we can explain science as it evolves, rationally and consciously. We have to use the crude tool of metaphor to translate conscious ideas into unconscious understanding. Just as the metaphor, a living Earth, used to explain Gaia, was wrongly rejected by reductionist scientists, so it may be wrong of them also to reject the metaphors and fables of the sacred texts. Crude as they may be, but they serve to ignite an intuitive understanding of God and creation that cannot be falsified by rational argument.
As a scientist I know that Gaia Theory is provisional and likely to be displaced by a larger and more complete view of the Earth. But for now, I see it as the seed from which an instinctive environmentalism can grow; one that would instantly reveal planetary health or disease and help sustain a healthy world.
Green thoughts and ideas are as diverse and competitive as the plants of a forest ecosystem and, unlike the plants, they do not even share the spectral purity of the color of chlorophyll. Green thoughts range from shades of reds to shades of blue. The totalitarian greens, sometimes called ecofascists, would like to see most other humans eliminated in genocide and so leave a prefect Earth for them alone. At the other end of the spectrum are those who would like to see universal human welfare and rights, and somehow hope that luck, Gaia or sustainable development will allow this dream to come true. Greens could be defined as those who have sensed the deterioration of the natural world and would like to do something about it. They share a common environmentalism but differ greatly in the means for its achievements.
The root of our problems with the environment comes from a lack of constraint on the growth of population. There is no single right number of people that we can have as a goal: the number varies with our way of life on the planet and the state of its health. It has varied naturally from a few million when we were hunters and gatherers to a fraction of a billion as simple farmers; but now it has grown to over seven billion, which is wholly unsuitable in the present state of Gaia, even if we had the will and the ability to cut back.
If we could go back to, for example, 1840 and start again we might be able to reach a stable population of six billion if we were guided from the beginning by a proper understanding of the Earth, We woud now that fossil-fuel combustion needed limiting and that cattle and sheep farming use far too much land and cannot be sustained, and that arable farming, with pigs and chickens as food animals consuming mainly vegetable waste, would be a better way to go. It might even be possible to sustain ten billion or more living in well-planned, dense cities and eating synthesized food.
If we can overcome the self-generated threat of deadly climate change, caused by our massive destruction of ecosystems and global pollution, our next task will be to ensure that our numbers are always commensurate with our and Gaia’s capacity to nourish them. Personally, I think we would be wise to aim a stabilized population of about half to none billion, and then we would be free to live in many different ways without harming Gaia. At first this may seem a difficult, unpalatable, even hopeless task, but events during the last century suggest that it might be easier than we think. Thus, in prosperous societies, when women are given a fair chance to develop their potential, they choose voluntarily to be less fecund. It is only a small step towards a better way of living with Gaia, and it has brought with it problems of a distorted age structure in society and dysfunctional family life, but it is a seed of optimism from which other voluntary controls could grow and surely far better than the cold concept of eugenics that withered in its own immorality. In the end, as always, Gaia will do the culling and eliminate those that break her rules. We have the choice to accept this fate or plan our own destiny within Gaia. Whatever we choose to do we have always to ask, what are the consequences?
The regulation of fecundity is part of population control, but the regulation of the death rate is also important. Here, too, people in affluent societies are choosing voluntarily seemly ways to die. Traditionally, hospitals have for the elderly been places for dying in comparative comfort and painlessness; the hospice movement has served to set standards and make this otherwise unmentionable role of the health systems acceptable. According to Hodkinson, in his book An Outline of Geriatrics, about 25 per cent of the elderly entering hospitals die within two months. Now that the Earth is in imminent danger of a transition to a hot and inhospitable state, it seems amoral to strive ostentatiously to extend our personal lifespan beyond its normal biological limit of about one hundred years. When I was a young post-doctoral fellow at Harvard medical School in Boston an eminent pediatrician complained of the huge, more than tenfold, disparity between funds given for cancer research and those given for childhood disease, I suspect that still exists.
We have severed nearly all of the natural physical constraints on the growth of our species: we can live anywhere from the Arctic to the tropics and, while they last, our water supplies are piped to us. We are only just beginning to realize that pandemics may evolve naturally as a negative feedback on population growth. If we are to continue as a civilization that successfully avoids natural catastrophes, we have to make them strong and make them now.
Over half the Earth’s people live in cites, and they hardly ever see, feel or hear the natural world. Therefore, our first duty should be to convince them that the real world is the living Earth and that they and their city lives are a part of it and wholly dependent on it for their existence. Our role is to teach and to set an example by our lives. In certain ways my longtime friend Edward Goldsmith was one of the few who tried to live and think as a deep ecologist. His erudite and thought-provoking book The Way is essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about green philosophy.
I would like to see us use our technical skills to cure the ills of the Earth as well as those of humans. This is not surprising since my first experience in science was 25 years in medical research. I cannot stand aside while civilization drinks itself to death in fossil fuels. And this is why I regard nuclear energy as a needed remedy.
The green community should have been reluctant to found lobbies and political parties; both are concerned with people and their problems. Our task as individuals is to think of Gaia first. In no way does this make us inhuman or uncaring: our survival as a species is wholly dependent on Gaia and on our acceptance of her discipline.
I am often asked, ‘What is our place in Gaia?’ To answer we need to look back a long time ago in human history to when we were an animal, a primate, living within Gaia and different from other species only in unimportant ways. Our role then was like theirs, to recycle carbon and other elements. We lived on an omnivorous diet and returned to the air as carbon dioxide the carbon collected in their lifetimes by our food animals and plants. We had our niche in the evolutionary system, and our numbers were probably not more than a million.
As intelligent predators, we were equipped with useful brains and hands and could alter the boundaries of our niche in ways that were unavailable to other animals. We could throw stones, use simple stone and wood tools, and do it better than other primates.
Many animals, even insects like bees and ants, can communicate. They use alarms and mating calls and pass on detailed information about the size, direction and distance of food sources. We humans were fortunate to acquire through a mutation the ability to modulate our voices sufficiently for a primitive spoken language. This change was as profound for us as primitive people as the invention of the computer or mobile phone has been for modern humans. The members of the tribe could share experiences; they could plan ahead against drought and famine and guard against predators. We were by then the emerging Homo sapiens and may have been the first animals consciously to modify the environment for their own benefit. Most remarkably, we used natural fires started by lightning for cooking, clearing land and hunting.
The innocent among the urban intelligentsia think and talk of early humans as living in harmony with the natural world. Some of them go further and gather funds to preserve what they see as natural communities living in remote regions, such as the tropical forests. They see the modern world as clever but bad and these simple lifestyles as natural and good. They are wrong. We should not think of early humans as better or worse than we are; indeed, they were probably very little different.
Others consider us superior because of our cultured ways and intellectual tendencies; our technology lets us drive cars, use word processors and travel great distances by air. Some of us live in air-conditioned houses and we are entertained by the media. We think that we are more intelligent than stone-agers, yet how many modern could live successfully in caves, or would know how to light wood fires for cooking, or make clothes and shoes from animal skins or bows and arrows good enough to keep their families fed? I am indebted to Jerry Glynn and Theodore Gray for making this point in their guidebook for users of the computer program Mathematica, a mathematics processor. Using as an example the fact that modern children can hardly a column of numbers without a calculator, they observe that this is no bad thing since each stage of human development brings with it a full measure of skills exchanged for others no longer needed; stone-agers were probably as fully occupied with living as we are.
One group of these early humans migrated to Australia at a time when the sea levels were much lower than now and the journey by boat or raft was probably neither long nor difficult. From this group are descended the modern Australians aboriginals, often claimed to be an example of natural humans at peace with the Earth. Yet their method of clearing forests by fire may have destroyed the natural forests of the Australian continent as surely as do modern men with chainsaws. Peace on you Aboriginals; you individually are no worse and no better than we are, it is just that we are power-assisted and more numerous.
Through Gaia I see science and technology as traits possessed by humans that have the potential for great good and great harm. Because we are part of, and not separate from Gaia, our intelligence is a new capacity and strength for her as well as a new danger. Evolution is iterative, mistakes are made, blunders committed; but in time that great eraser and corrector, natural selection, usually keeps a neat and tidy world. Perhaps ours and Gaia’s greatest error was the conscious abuse of fire. Cooking meat over a wood fire may have been acceptable, but the deliberate destruction of whole ecosystems by fire merely to drive out the animals within was surely our first great sin against the living Earth. It has haunted us ever since and combustion could now be our auto da fe, and the cause of our extinction.
Building Materials, Health and Indoor Air Quality: No Breathing Space?
By
Tom Woolley
Preface
This book launches a broadside attack on those who fail to take account of the true wide-ranging impacts of building design on peoples lives, and will act as a wake-up call to all those engaged with manufacturing, certifying, designing, specifying and installing building products and systems. The authors to the cause of advancement of knowledge of building materials and products is globally recognised, and this latest work finds his appetite for deeper understanding and awareness undiminished, At times controversial, tom challenges those who make claims for health and wellbeing in their built projects, and asks them to examine the broader context surrounding “business as usual”, including the prevailing commercial and marketing forces, and evaluate from first principles the consequences of specification choices on the quality of people’s lives.
Against the background of leading clients’ calls for productivity and health in project outcomes, designers are faced with a shocking lack of agreed standards and legislation in this field and are to a large extent ‘flying blind’. As we demand better building performance, our knowledge and understanding of building physics and the chemistry of products and materials need to increase to an appropriate level – at the very least sufficient to define what ‘good’ should deliver in terms of the indoor environment in which people spend 90% of their time. Tom asks questions to which we must seek answers, or face consequences which the balance of probability suggests are generally negative for building user health, and potentially disastrous for consumer confidence in the construction sector. The author draws together a powerful argument for urgent action, bringing scientific and medical issues to bear on building design and understanding of real performance in use, and he offers us a range of useful references and pointers to guide us along the path to delivering better indoor air quality and positive outcomes for building owners and occupiers. There are messages here for policy-makers and environmental lawyers as well as building professionals and users – these are timely messages and we must heed the call.
Lynne Sullivan OBE, RIBA
Introduction
No breathing space?
The buildings we inhabit…are contaminated with hazardous and toxic materials that we breathe in every day of our lives and there seems no escape from this. Architects, builders, their clients, government bodies and the medical profession refuse to deal with the environmental causes of ill health and indoor air quality is ignored. Hence the subtitle of this book No Breathing Space? as we seem stuck in a place that we cannot escape from.
Evidence about the health impacts of hazardous construction is extensive and compelling, as should become apparent in this book, but we are also trapped as medical epidemiology has largely ignored the issue and evidence of causative effects is patchy at best. We have to rely on circumstantial evidence and make a choice whether to safeguard our health or ignore the risks. This book advocates the precautionary principle as the way to make choices about building materials and products. It warns of the dangers of using synthetic and chemical based materials, when natural and healthy alternatives are available. Evidence of the health risks from hazardous products is set out but none of this is entirely conclusive as much medical epidemiological research into the health effects of toxic and hazardous materials and poor indoor air quality still remains to be done. Overall, the evidence about the dangers of hazardous materials is circumstantial and direct association between specific materials and illness cannot always be made. This is because we live in a world where we are breathing in a cocktail of dangerous substances from a wide range of sources on a daily basis. Some of us are lucky to avoid any serious illness whereas others succumb to respiratory diseases, asthma or cancer. Pregnant mothers, babies in the womb and young children are particularly vulnerable and subject to endocrine-disrupting substances that are having an impact on reproduction and long-term health.
There are plenty of medical experts and others who like to deny the importance of environmental causes of ill health. They are stuck in a rigid and inflexible approach to healthcare that is based purely on hereditary, genetic and normal clinical explanations for illness. Without any real evidence, they are keen to ignore facts that are staring at them in the face about environmental causes for illness. There are also many in the construction industry who are completed wedded to the idea that modern science and technology and the use of chemical materials is the only way to go and they are remarkably prejudiced against the use of safer alternatives. Even lawyers active around environmental issues have failed to engage with indoor air problems.
For many, indoor air quality is an unknown subject but many people have heard of ‘sick building syndrome’.
Whatever happened to sick building syndrome?
It would be reasonable to assume that ensuring indoor air quality would be a key factor when designing and constructing buildings. The term sick building syndrome became well known in the 1980s and still lingers today, though largely associated with poorly airconditioned offices. However, the health impacts of buildings are still poorly understood and rarely taken into account as a key priority when buildings are designed or renovated. Architects, when specifying building materials are mainly concerned with cost, availability, robustness and aesthetics, not their impacts on health. Yet as we spend up to 90 percent of our time indoors, the air we breathe is affected by environmental conditions and hazardous emissions from building materials. Indoor air quality (IAQ) is in fact a key issue for our lives.
The aim of this book is to provide, as comprehensively as possible, an introduction as to why many buildings are not healthy, and the contribution of building materials to this and how it is possible to avoid these problems. Hopefully this book will help to throw some light on the real evidence and indicate how important and urgent it is that we reduce the dangers of indoor air pollution.
The term “sick building syndrome” (SBS) is used to describe situations in which buildings occupants experience acute health and comfort effects that appear to be linked to time spent in a building, but no specific illness or cause can be identified. SBS is not a useful concept as it both creates the idea that a building can be sick and also implies that the problem is more with the building occupant (a syndrome) than the building. The UK National Health Service (NHS) explains SBS by listing real symptoms:
- Headaches and dizziness
- Nausea (feeling sick)
- Aches and pains
- Fatigue (extreme tiredness)
- Poor concentration
- Shortness of breath or chest tightness
- Eye and throat irritation
- Irritated, blocked or runny nose
- Skin irritation (skin rashes, dry itchy skin)
As will be seen in this book, it is possible to ink illnesses with specific causes in buildings, whether they be damp and mould or toxic pollutants. People who develop illnesses as a result of poor indoor quality are not always suffering from psychosomatic problems, as was often suggested in the literature about SBS, but are directly affected by pollutants. Recent medical literature, discussed below, also attributes accelerated deaths to pollution.
The symptoms listed above are genuine health problems and many may result from poor indoor air quality and toxic emissions from building materials. It must be acknowledged that there are people who become hypersensitive to certain substances in buildings and this may itself become a health problem in its own right. Some people become extremely anxious about chemical pollution and this may be more severe than the actual medical effects and can be seen as a syndrome, but while serious for the victims, this only affects a tiny number of people. It is important that where readers of this book have anxieties or fears about the issues in this book that they take more action to make practical and physical changes to their indoor environment rather than getting ill worrying about it.
Health problems resulting from or affected by indoor air pollution are considerable and include:
- Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
- Asthma
- Carbon monoxide poisoning
- Respiratory illnesses of various kinds
- Irritation
- Sensitivity to chemicals and pollutants
- Cancer
- Hormone disruption
The medical response to indoor pollution
A recent report from the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, Every Breath We take: The lifelong impact of air pollution, marks a significant change in the attitude of the medical profession to indoor air quality and an acknowledgement of the dangers of chemical pollutants. For many years, environmental causes of illness have been ignored, as genetic, viral and other medical causes have been favoured. More recently, concern has tended to focus on outdoor air pollution, but the RCP report at long last recognises the seriousness of indoor air pollution.
The concentration indoors is as much as ten times higher than that outdoors because of the presence of internal sources. This emphasises the importance of indoor air quality – not only do we spend considerably more time indoors than out, but the range and concentration of pollutants inside buildings are often much greater than those found outdoors.
The RCP states that indoor air pollution may have caused or contributed to 99,0000 deaths per annum in Europe but says that the practicalities of setting guidelines and establishing control policies for indoor air pollutants are difficult: ‘because of the complexity of pollution sources and the multitude of parties potentially responsible for causing, monitoring and/or regulating indoor air pollution’.
Sadly, the RCP report still tends to promote the idea that the main problem is with external air pollution from traffic but it does at least go into sources of indoor air pollution including volatile organic compounds (VOCs), formaldehyde, paints, glues, etc., etc. Having drawn attention to these problems they then mistakenly state that while VOCs (the main source of indoor air pollution) are very common ‘their health effects are generally minor’. This is poor science, as the RCP does not provide any evidence to back up this statement and even quotes the World Health Organization (WHO) as having classified household air pollution as an ‘extremely important risk factor accounting for 4.3 million deaths worldwide in 2012’.
It would be easy to become confused about the health risks of indoor air pollution when reading the RCP report as it plays down the importance of emissions from building materials such as VOCs and puts more emphasis on other emitters such as external air pollution, smoking and radon.
BBC TV and other media reporting of the RCP report was quick to find an ‘expert’ who was willing to deny the risks of indoor air quality. Professor Anthony Frew was widely interviewed by TV and radio as a critic of the report, suggesting that improvements in air quality would only save a few lives and that deaths from air pollution had only been ‘brought forward’. In other words, people affected would have died anyway! Frew believes that the cost of improving air quality would not be worthwhile and this reflects the attitude among much of the healthcare world that it is worth putting with the risks from modern industry and technology:
Living has never been risk free and we make compromises all the time between our short-term comfort and long-term health…Its findings have to be seen in the context that on average we live longer, healthier lives than we did in previous generations, and that much of this is due to the industrial improvements that cause the pollution.
Frew (a consultant at the Royal Sussex County Hospital and a Nuffield Health consultant) working in respiratory medicine, asthma and allergy treatment and immunotherapy represents the mainstream medical view, which constantly downplays the significance of environmental causes, raising doubts about environmental improvements because of the cost, and instead preferring drug treatments. His comment about short-term risks will not be much comfort to those suffering from severe respiratory conditions or cancer.
Allergen avoidance: once an allergic disorder had developed, the chances of further attacks could be minimised by avoiding the allergen or other environmental conditions which aggravated the condition. However, the question of whether the avoidance of factors such as house dust mite resulted in substantial clinical improvement, whether these approaches were cost-effective, and who should pay for such measures, was controversial.
When a medical expert says something is controversial it is a coded way of saying that they don’t agree with it. There is the implication that environmental solutions would be too costly, however, the drug treatments Frew advocates are also very expensive to develop and may have unwanted side effects. There are strong vested interests in promoting the multi-million-pound drugs industry rather than searching for simpler and cheaper environmental solutions. The medical experts create a win-win situations for themselves by failing to carry out epidemiological studies of environmental causes of illness and then saying that there is insufficient evidence.
The construction industry’s attitude to indoor pollution
By and large, the construction industry has a head-in=the=sand attitude to indoor air pollution and air quality. When carrying out research for this book, both clients and their architects were interviewed about their approach to healthy buildings and it was found that general ignorance was the norm. When offered the chance to learn more about the subject and commission a low-cost IAQ test of a building, the offers were declined without exception. Of course, IAQ problems can rarely be seen (except in the case of mold growth) and thus ‘out of sight out of mind’ may have been the general view. Even architects involved in the design of healthcare buildings seemed unaware of the issues.
A lack of awareness of IAQ is reflective of the lack of post-occupancy evaluations of buildings. Rarely does anyone check whether the building achieved what was intended.
Designers and builders are trained to undertake building work and hand over the keys, not to look into what happens afterwards. Few clients want to pay for anything more. Meanwhile government, which helped to close the feedback via its building design, management and research departments…tends to have outsourced, privatized or abandoned most of these functions.
The lack of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) means that little is known about whether buildings ever achieve the energy and environmental conditions predicted, and nothing is checked about the IAQ. Somehow as a society we have come to accept poor-quality buildings; just something to grumble about along with the weather. However the scientific evidence that does exist confirms that many buildings have serious performance problems, heating bills are higher than expected, predicted insulation performance underachieved, mould and damp are widespread and occupant comfort is problematic. ‘Ahhh…the comforts of home’. If a home is ‘efficient’ surely it’s ‘comfortable,’ right? Not necessarily. The poor performance of modern buildings has been well documented and this is often referred to as the ‘performance gap”. Mainstream organisations such as Zero Carbon Hub and Innovate UK have been surprisingly open the poor performance of the rare examples of POE tested buildings, though they have largely been concerned with energy efficiency, not IAQ.
There is no doubt that traffic and chemical pollution outdoors have a bad effect on our health and emissions should be reduced, but many reports on this problem fail to mention indoor air pollution even though, as will be shown later, this is a much more serious problem. ‘More people die from air pollution than Malaria and HIV/Aids, new study shows: More than 3 million people die prematurely each year from outdoor pollution and without action deaths will double by 2050.
Indoor air quality is more serious than external air pollution
Despite official attempts to ignore IAQ in the UK, there are many authoritative sources that point out that indoor air problems have a much more significant effect on our health than external pollution.
Indoor air is often more polluted than outside. Many factors contribute to poor indoor air quality, including tobacco smoke; cleaning products; pesticides; formaldehyde; cleaning agents; waxes and polishing compounds, fragrances; plasticisers in wallpaper, rugs and fragrances; components of building structures (such as sealants, plastics, adhesives, and insulation materials).
Indoor air pollution is often higher than outdoor air pollution. This has been observed in indoor spaces including public buildings, schools, kindergartens and homes in developed countries, especially when significant sources of indoor and outdoor air pollution exist. The quality of the indoor environment is affected by the quality of ambient air, building materials and ventilation; consumer products, including furnishings and electrical appliances, cleaning and household products; occupants’ behaviour, such as smoking; and building maintenance. For example, energy savings measures make buildings and houses airtight by reducing ventilation, thus raising concerns over indoor air quality, as chemical and biological pollutant concentrations can reach high levels.
Most medical organizations have ignored IAQ, with the notable exception of the British Lung Foundation that has published some reasonable, though slightly flawed, guidelines: Your Home and Your Lungs: ‘You might consider using building materials with low emissions. Look for products and materials that show they are environmentally friendly and low in pollutants and emissions. Cancer charities, rather surprisingly do not have policies of excluding carcinogenic materials from their own buildings, and when interviewed showed little knowledge or understanding of indoor air problems, as discussed more fully in Chapter 4.
It will be essential to win over the medical professionals and scientists to understanding building-related medical problems, as suggested by Zhang:
Small changes in indoor pollutant sources can have the equivalent health benefit as large changes in outdoor sources for the same pollutant. Without the active participation of building designers who appreciate the importance of indoor air quality, it would be impossible to design and construct healthy buildings. Likewise, without the active participation of health scientists and professionals in resolving the puzzles of building-related medically unexplained symptoms and other illnesses, it would be impossible to develop reliable and effective guidelines to prevent excess health risks associated with poor indoor air quality.
The issues of airtightness, energy efficiency and problems with ventilation are explored more fully in this book, as this may have unwittingly caused an increase in bad IAQ.
This leads us back to the issue of SBS because it was frequently put down to poor ventilation. SBS is a term familiar to many people, but was largely seen as an issue for mechanical and electrical engineers responsible for ventilation and air conditioning. NHS guidance suggest that SBS is poorly understood though there is also some truth in the following:
Anyone can be affected by SBS, but office workers in modern buildings without opening windows and with mechanical ventilation or air conditioning systems are most at risk…Since the 1970s, researchers have tried to identify the cause of SBS. As yet, no single cause has been identified. Most experts believe that it may be the result of a combination of things.
The US environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a fact sheet on SBS in 1991: ‘A 1984 world Health Committee report suggested that up to 30 percent of new and remodeled buildings worldwide may be the subject of excessive complaints related to indoor air quality (IAQ)’.
SBS is a misleading term, as it implies that buildings can make you sick, whereas the problem is much more to do with poor IAQ, and not necessarily the whole building. Quite minor changes in materials may remove the problem. SBS has largely faded from the headlines and professional concern in recent years. ‘What Happened to Sick Building Syndrome? SBS Has Faded From Headlines, But Is It Still a Problem? However, problems of building occupants feeling sick have not gone away and with increased air tightness and the growing use of hazardous materials, problems may be getting worse. ‘Is Your Office Killing You? – Sick Building Syndrome – Is It Still a Problem?
SBS has been redefined as building-related illness (BRI) as a more useful term:
BRI is generally an allergic reaction or infection, and specific symptoms include cough, chest tightness, fever, chills, and muscle aches. The symptoms may continue after occupants have left the building, and the cause of symptoms is known,’ said Stadtner. ‘Humidifier fever, legionnaires disease, skin rashes, hypersensitivity pneumonitis, and other illnesses related to bacteria, fungus (mold), and viruses are often classified as BRI, not SBS.
Choosing less-hazardous building materials
One of the main contributors to poor IAQ (apart from ventilation problems) is the way in which the building is constructed and the materials used to construct it. Thus, this book largely focuses on what is known about construction materials and how these might create health problems. Rather than stating that certain materials are good or bad, this judgement is left to the reader to base their choice and specification decisions on the best information that it has been possible to present here.
If in doubt, the best approach to adopt is that of the precautionary principle. If there appear to be serious concerns, even if reliable scientific information still leaves some doubt, then surely it is better to avoid the risk and go for an alternative that is substantially less risky. Fortunately, today there are plenty of building methods and materials available that are very low risk and largely avoid the use of hazardous chemicals.
Unfortunately, the industry has relied for some years on the Green Guide to Specification, produced by the Building Research Establishment (BRE), to select materials on the misapprehension that this provides a good environmental guide. Unfortunately, the Green Guide has largely ignored health, and embodied energy in its life cycle analysis (LCA) methodology. Any product that was alleged to contribute to energy efficiency was given an ‘A star’ rating, whether made from hazardous materials or not. Fortunately, the BRE has introduced IAQ standards into the Building Research establishment Environmental assessment Methodology (BREEAM) and the new Home Quality mark but there are real contradictions with guidance about materials in the Green Guide.
Ventilation and a critique of Passiv Haus
Natural, passive and purge ventilation
Given the growing evidence of concerns about MVHR systems and their ability to safeguard good IAQ, it is important to assess whether natural ventilation measures can ensure good air quality. ‘Fresh air’ is a complicated concept because in cities, opening the windows will let in polluted air from traffic and other sources. Even in the countryside, pesticides and other agricultural chemicals may be allowed into the house. However, we all need to breathe clean air and outside is normally the best place to find it.
Even though numerous authorities state that poor IAQ is much more dangerous than external air pollution, many governments have chosen to focus on external air problems at the expense of research and policy on indoor air. Living in an artificially ventilated environment for much of the time is not good for health, but many offices, schools and healthcare buildings are now dependent on mechanical air handling. Opening windows is less and less common. However, medical research has shown that opening windows is much better for health than mechanical ventilation. Jopson argues that ‘regularly hospital rooms still have fewer bacteria overall…but if the windows are between the cleanings, the bacteria that are present will be less likely to cause a disease or an infection.
Gilbert, a microbiologist at the Argonne National Laboratory Biosciences Division, advocates opening hospital windows to stem spread of infection, something that Florence Nightingale believed in many years before! Gilberts’s views reflect work by Kembel et al., examining microbiological samples in buildings and this study also refers to natural ventilation from open windows.
The effect of ventilating rooms with outdoor air entering directly through open windows: Our findings suggest that it is worthwhile to explore the effects of natural ventilation on microbial communities more rigorously using modern molecular tools, as we found that the abundance of potentially pathogenic bacteria was not higher in window-ventilated patient rooms that in mechanically ventilated rooms.
The active house concept
(Active House) supports the vision of buildings that create healthier and more comfortable lives for their residents without impacting negatively on the climate and environment – thus moving us towards a cleaner, healthier and safer world. Materials used have a positive impact on comfort and indoor climate…through the use of low emitting materials.
The Active House measures a lot of things that the Passiv House doesn’t, such as light and view, indoor air quality, natural ventilation and daylighting, all of which can be improved by, you guessed it, more opening windows and skylights.
There is an assumption, among many architects and engineers, that natural ventilation cannot ensure sufficient air changes or adequate input of clean air even though this has worked for centuries in hot countries, combining thermal mass for cooling and roof vents, shading and courtyards. Modern ‘passive stack’ ventilation systems are available and have ben found to be effective. There are even novel systems, which claim to achieve heat recovery without using mechanical systems, as well as providing natural ventilation.
Another option is to consider humidity sensitive mechanical hybrid ventilation systems. A range of these are now available and are claimed to be much more energy efficient than MVHR and many avoid the need for expensive and complicated ducting systems. Demand controlled ventilation means that the mechanical extract only kicks in when humidity rises. Such hybrid arrangements mean that a ventilation stack can operate in either a completely passive mode or mechanical in the same system. The systems are designed to cope with changing weather and internal conditions.
MVHR systems may be more efficient in terms of heat recovery, if they work efficiently, but a lot more independent research is need to verify whether this is actually the case. Most data currently available from research bodies such as Fraunhofer have been commissioned by commercial companies. ‘The saving is 17.4% when using a demand controlled exhaust ventilation system. Using completely natural ventilation effectively in a building requires careful thought by designers and considerable attention to microclimates and the siting of buildings. Considerable technical expertise is available to understand natural ventilation. Allard says that ‘occupants of naturally ventilated buildings are usually happier with their indoor environments than when they have little control over them’, though he admits that the barriers to implementing natural ventilation are numerous and discouraging.
Purge ventilation
Purge ventilation is an important option to maintain good IAQ but it does rely on the building occupants taking responsibility for this. Purge ventilation measures are set out in the UK building regulations as intermittent extraction by opening windows, doors and rooflights and this can be very useful to reduce contaminants. Cooker extractor hoods are also a form of purge ventilation. Careful management of a building can include opening windows and roof lights to provide a good exchange of fresh air without massive heat loss. As it says in the UK building regulations:
Adequate purge ventilation may be achieved by the use of openable windows and/or external doors of the following sizes:
- A hinged or pivot window that opens 30 degrees or more, or sliding sah window where the height x width of the opening is at least 1/20th of the floor area of the room.
- A hinged or pivot window that opens less than 30 degrees, the height x width of the opening area is at least 1/10th of the floor area of the room.
- An external door (including patio doors) that has an opening area at least 1/20th of the floor area of the room.
Despite the criticisms of PH and mechanical ventilation in this chapter, there is no doubt that greater energy efficiency and better ventilation in buildings are essential and a good thing. What is important is that we have the best and most reliable forms of ventilation available, both natural and mechanical, and that energy efficiency is not achieved at the expense of good air quality and lower impact materials. The myopic use of petrochemical materials to achieve energy savings is mistaken, as the manufacture of these materials is also contributing to CO2 emissions and this is not necessarily offset by energy saved in buildings.
Healthy building theories
Building Biology
An institute of Building Biology was founded in Germany in 1983. This laid down many of the principles of healthy building, which have become widely accepted, and have influenced many of the practitioners of healthy building. However, even here, many of the practitioners of building biology (BB) also subscribe to New Age pseudoscience. For instance, the Australian College of Environmental Studies provides courses in ‘Building Biology and Feng Shui’ and a US BB practitioner calls their business, Feng Shui Magic. Despite this, BB is a largely sound science and holistic approach to creating healthy and sustainable buildings.
The main focus of Building Biology is human health…and achieving deep ecology is a by-product of this. A central concept of Building Biology is that there is almost always a direct correlation between the biological compatibility of a building and its ecological performance.’ In other words, buildings that deeply nurture every aspect of human health in production, occupation, and post-habitation will also excel as models of sustainability. Why? …Because the natural environment is the gold standard for human health and the ultimate model of sustainability. The role of our indoor environments is to temper nature’s extremes of temperature and to keep us dry and safe from predators.
According to Healthy building Science there are 25 principle of building biology as shown below:
- Verify that the building site is geologically undisturbed
- Place dwellings away from sources of air pollution and noise
- Place dwellings well apart from each other in spaciously planned developments amid green areas
- P1lan homes and developments takin into consideration the needs of the community, families, individuals and the natural ecosystem
- Building activities shall promote health and social well-being
- Use natural and unadulterated building materials
- Allow natural self-regulation of indoor air humidity using hygroscopic (moisture buffering) building materials
- Assure low total moisture content and rapid desiccation of wet construction processes in new buildings
- Design for a balance between heat storage and thermal insulation
- Plan for optimal surface and air temperature
- Provide for adequate natural ventilation
- Use thermal radiation for heating buildings employing passive solar energy as much as possible.
- Provide ample natural light and use illumination and colour in accordance with nature
- Minimize the alteration of vital cosmic and terrestrial radiation
- Minimize man-made electromagnetic and radio frequency exposure
- Avoid building materials that have elevated radioactivity levels
- Provide adequate protection from noise and infrasonic vibration or sound conducted through solids
- Utilize building materials which have neutral or pleasant natural scents and which do not outgas toxics
- Minimize occurrence of fungi, bacteria, dust and allergens
- Provide the best possible water quality
- Support building activities and production of materials which do not have adverse side effects and which promotes health and social well-being throughout their life-cycle
- Minimize energy consumption utilizing renewable energy as much as possible
- Source building materials locally and that do not contribute to the exploitation of scarce or hazardous resources
- Utilize physiological and ergonomic knowledge in furniture and space design
- Consider proportion, harmonic orders and shapes in design
These principles are generally sound, though ‘assuring low total moisture content’ has led to a rigid rejection, by some German architects, of deep ecological building solutions such as hempcrete. Minimizing the ‘alteration of vital cosmic and terrestrial radiation’ can lead to mystical beliefs in ley lines and geopathic stress.
…set out the following ‘key element’ to be considered in BB, as well as the 25 principles:
- Air – high IAQ
- Water – clean water supplies and treatment
- Materials – the use of non-toxic and natural materials that are vapour permeable
- Energy – low energy passive design and thermal comfort and the use of appropriate renewable technologies
BB investigates the indoor living environment for a variety of irritants including:
- VOCs in the air
- Infestation from mould
- Fungi and parasites
- Daylight and acoustic levels
- Electromagnetic radiation including: alternating energy fields, alternating magnetic fields, static electric fields, static magnetic fields, radio frequencies and radiation
- Healthy occupation and maintenance of buildings
Science-based policy on healthy buildings
There are a number of organizations in the USA that provide a comprehensive resource concerned with healthy buildings. The Healthy Building Network (HBN) founded in 2000 is perhaps the most important. Its aim is to reduce the use of hazardous chemicals in building products. The HBN points out that:
Most chemicals used in building products are not tested for their impact on human health. We may assume everyday building products won’t harm us, but we still can’t reliably know that they won’t. We focus on building products for two reasons:
- First, the US EPA estimates that Americans spend as much as 90% of their time indoors, and can be exposed to unhealthy chemicals there at much greater concentrations than outdoors.
- Second, the volumes of building products are so great – in excess of 3 billion pounds produced annually – that reducing the use of hazardous materials not only benefits the people who build, maintain and occupy buildings, but also the manufacturing sites and communities from which the materials come, and the dumps, incinerators or recycling facilities to which they are sent after their useful life.
There are numerous examples – removing lead from paint, arsenic from pressure treated wood, and formaldehyde from particleboard – of how reducing the use of hazardous chemicals in our building products can improve the quality of our lives and our environments from the local to the global scale.
Associated with HBN is the Pharos project, which has created an independent database for identifying health hazards associated with building products.
The Pharos Project encourages manufactures to disclose all ingredients in building products; helps architects, designers and building owners avoid using products that contain harmful chemicals; and creates incentives for product redesign and modification to reduce the impacts of hazardous materials use throughout the lifecycle of building products.
HBN/Pharos have issued a number of reports, which are free to download. They also have a subscription-based product library though there is a free trial period. The have staff of a dozen or more and are well supported by architectural practices and a wide range of organizations. They appear to have a good working relationship with the US Green Building Council and some aspects of LEED. While they claim that their approach is entirely research based, it was not possible to find out the degree of independence thay have from the companies whose products they include in their library. HBN sets out the following principles:
The Right To Know
We all have a right to know what is in the products we specify, buy and use
Precautionary Principle
Take precautionary actions based on the weight of available evidence and in the face of uncertainty.
The Responsibility of the Manufacturer
Manufacturers possess important information about the contents of their products and have a responsibility to be accountable for things they make.
Transparency
Share all assumptions, methodology, data and analysis. Reward manufacturers who fully disclose contents, and processes to allow for meaningful analysis.
Optimism
Acknowledging that our goals are ambitious and difficult to attain, we believe they are within the grasp of committed professionals working in good faith.
Define the Ideal
It is an act of optimism to set an ideal goal representing how we believe our products can be good for the world, rather than just issue prohibitions and warnings on what is bad.
Coalition and Consensus Building
The sheer magnitude of tools, standards and ratings is now confusing and becoming counterproductive in the marketplace. HBN seeks consensus in establishing green material standards.
Accessible Presentation
Mindful of the complexity of the work we undertake, HBN will provide accurate materials that are elegant, informational and user-friendly.
Life Cycle Thinking
Assess impacts along the entire life cycle of the material from extraction to disposal using a wide range of tools.