Save-ior
By 'Cia' Rodemann
Tags: change leadership, futuristics, thinking outside the box
Category: Uncategorized
One day in an insufferably long wait (like 7 hours before the next flight) en route to a speaking engagement, I began to make a list of key things I remember and had learned from each of the people in my life. This was no ordinary list, but a bullet point/phrase list of character traits/characteristics that embodied that individual. For my aunt, whose birthday was the end of January, one of the traits I listed was ‘the original re-cycler before anyone knew what that was about’. She was also a devoted ‘church lady’ but not in the SNL skit/spoof sense. She truly lived kindness, humility, charity etc. And she valued nature, often enjoying the different birds which stopped by to feed. Now I read bird populations are rapidly diminishing as migratory patterns and climate shift and food sources become scarce. The bees which arrived to pollinate her apple and pear trees struggling mightily.
Her garden thrived from compost and kitchen scraps, though a neighbor complained about unwelcome wildlife. She relished bio-diversity and saved her seeds to propagate new plants come Spring and Summer. Having survived The Great Depression, she took things to an extreme at times with the slogan, ‘make it do and wear it out and do with out’. There were piles of washed fabrics for making quilts for shut-ins, and cut up old towels for cleaning rags rather than using paper towels. There were containers of small nails, big nails, twist tie offs, buttons, bread bags, washed and stacked tin foil, wax paper, wrapping paper-to be carefully folded and used again, boxes stacked flat and old newspapers to be rolled and made into kindling logs. (As she moved into her ’80′s it all got ahead of her.)
Of course, with the anti-clutter lobby, this would be frowned upon. In early adult-hood when things were tight, we adopted many of her habits. She’d purchase a two-for-one on eggs from the local ‘egg man’, to share the extra dozen with us during college years, or use a coupon for a free loaf of bread to tuck into a small shopping bag with extra garden produce.
In my corporate years, there was a huge push on SQP- safety, quality and productivity and later, reducing waste and inefficiency in the manufacturing process to lead to greater profitability. The mantra was lean manufacturing. It became a sign of the times with redudancy gone, waste and rejects not acceptable and soon, people expendable too, and others stretched to the max. Adding value was expected in all things design, advertising and marketing. Greater efficiency is a valuable stimulus.
Later, I had the opportunity to work with client companies who continued to look for ever greater cost efficiencies and began to source cheaper product off-shore to import, handling only design, marketing and distribution stateside. Ultimately, in a global economy things truly are different- the best ideas can come from anywhere and soon design was also outsourced. Design and marketing has become highly contextual and specialized and thrives among loosely connected networks of new specialists. Different locations and populations demand different goods and performance. Rapid solution teams can be readily assembled. Yet huge trade fairs, huge vendors and huge production runs continue to dominate. Increasingly, in the scenario of post peak oil, you have to ask if its not time to re-evaluate the paradigm which began to pick up momentum in the ’80′s and ’90′s and re-think locally produced, locally sourced and locally consumed.
We’ve built these huge consumer tastes and markets based upon shipping container loads or flying in goods from all over the globe. Its a fact that multi-national corporations are wealthier than smaller countries. It may very likely become cost effective to use a similar strategy to ‘cloud computing’ to create and promote local/regional networks for trade- in consumables. If I think outside the box as a ‘futurist’ and ‘save-ior’ then I want to see us embrace technology that turns manure into energy, incinerate waste rather than pumping it into water supplies, implement ways to use ‘gray water’; grow produce hydroponically and locally on a healthy scale, and support local farmers rather than flying the same goods from distant markets. I want to use more efficient and minimal packaging and embrace creative solutions.
A fellow designer became irate when I made a comment about how difficult it was to watch people ripping out good appliances simply because they weren’t au courant stainless. She suggested they were energy inefficient. ‘Are you suggesting we simply paint avocado or almond refrigerators?!’ she sniffed, missing the point. Yet scrap metals and component parts can be re-cycled. Rubber is recycled, copper . . . well, we know the theft issues with that! For the record, my aunt’s 1984 console TV with legs could not even be given to charity and it still worked great, while the flat screen we’d bought just 5 years before had died.
Anyone flying over the Western U.S. realizes how abundant wind and sunshine are. Why not power the air conditioning needs of -say Arizona- with solar panels. Israel and the Mediterranean countries increasingly do. The vision has been there for decades now, the technology is there and emerging rapidly- in Europe and Asia. I believe profitability is possible and probable, as a seminar on LEED showed by using energy efficient lighting and other examples right down to bottom line examples. The necessity for change leadership is ever more pressing, for thinking outside the box and making it happen. The future has a way of sneaking up all too quickly.
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