Circular Arguments

I bumped into an acquaintance this week who asked me to Blog more often. Buoyed up by the idea that someone out there might actually be reading this, I decided to oblige....

"This is a city built on the circular. So if you want to understand it, you have to get into that circular frame of mind. And that frame of mind is everywhere...... You refer to others in the same circle. You don't think outside the circle."

(Angus Lordie in "The World According to Bertie", by Alexander McCall Smith.

We often find ourselves saying, "We've come full circle". Indeed, it's a phrase that comes around again and again. Circles are mathematically pure, structurally strong, visually appealing. Circles are socially both inclusive and exclusive: "He mixes in certain circles".

In the worlds of design and systems, circles represent a more highly-evolved condition than lines. Closed-loop systems and feedbacks make for more efficient, more responsive operation - and this tends to be better for sustainability, too. A linear system has a productive output and a waste output, but in a closed-loop system there is, in theory at least, no waste.

Of course, there is also a negative language to contend with in terms of management and decision-making: "We're just going round in circles". "We're back where we started". "This is a circular argument". Linguistically we're making an assumption that, if we have gone around in a circle, we haven't made any progress.

Perhaps the problem is that we're getting hung up on travelling IN A CIRCULAR MOTION, whereas we should be thinking about travelling IN A CIRCULAR ENVIRONMENT. The area of land bounded by the M25 motorway is infinitely more varied and interesting than being on the road itself (although there is a whole other essay half-written in my head about roads....that's for another day). A circular walk is attractive over a point-to-point walk for three reasons: one, you know that there is your home, a railway station or a pub at both the start and end of it; two, you get to travel through places en route; three, you never have to turn back on yourself in order to reach your destination. It isn't the circular line itself that is of interest, but the sights, sounds and smells that lie either side of the line. In that example, it's worth noting that we can be just as interested in what is outside the circle as what's inside it or, put another way, what it is that the circle is travelling through.

We know that the world is round and that the universe is governed by circular forces. We are also familiar with the argument that life is not linear, but circular (we do call it a life-cycle, after all), and we can extrapolate from that that time is also circular. So, in terms of aspiring to make progress, in society, art, science, politics, whatever, the question we should really be asking is, "How do we want this to look next time it comes around?"

In the sphere of project management (note cunning use of circular language), it would be particularly interesting to move from linear planning to circular planning. Imagine a Gant Chart (sorry, I know, I loathe them too) where the end of the chart is actually back at the beginning. Yes, it would be possible to draw a circular Gant Chart, but would it be useful? We'd have to try it, to find out. More importantly, we could ask these questions:

1. Are we bound to travel all the way around the circle in order to complete the project, or can we make shortcuts within the circle?

2. If different project partners need to be at the same place in/on the circle at the same time, are there different arcs they could take that would intersect at the right points?

3. What is the operational landscape (time, resources, people, decisions) that the circle is travelling through?

4. What happens if someone goes off at a tangent?

5. How do we expect the start/end point to have changed when we get back there?

6. Do we plan to go round again?

This week'd homework is to try applying circular project planning to something you're currently working on. I'll see you back here next week, to find out how you got on.

AW

The Rebellious Ethic of Sustainability, or 'The Happy Addict'

I was reading recently an article from the Guardian by Adam Philips, a child psychologist, about the pursuit of happiness. What children need, he argues, is not to be happy but to be absorbed: happiness prevails when children are absorbed and interested in what they're doing.

Philips also recounts the story of a young patient who had been torturing animals. The child said that the power this gave him over the creatures made him feel really, momentarily alive - and he associated this ephemeral, horrifying feeling of vitality with happiness. And if we're honest, we can all recall a time of being very angry with someone or something, when the whole world takes on a peculiar intensity.

Mercifully, being angry doesn't make me happy. Nevertheless it is possible to understand how that fleeting intensity might be addictive. In fact, one could argue that all addictions are addictions to momentary experience and that, therefore, momentary experience is the element of the human condition that is addictive. Now here's a challenge: name a pursuit that generates momentary experience that is not, in some way or other, mortally (or morally) dangerous.

Is it the case that the whole point of momentary experience is that it blanks out any consideration of the past or future, and therefore of consequence? Are humans programmed to crave moments in life when they can forget about consequence, and escape the responsibilities of knowledge?

If we define 'functioning addicts' as those who are aware of their addiction, then these are people who utilise the momentary experience as escapism that helps them balance or manage the other, responsible side of their lives that faces up to its consequences. Obviously there is a danger that the pleasure of the escape becomes more attractive, on balance, than the alternative rewards of being in control, respected, responsible and alert to others' concerns. But so long as both aspects have comparable, complementary attractions, then there need be nothing wrong with being a functioning addict.

The trouble is, of course, that society appeals to people to limit their addictive habits by appealing to them to 'take responsibility' - for the effects they have on their health, relationships, and the dangers they pose to themselves and others. Yet often it is the burden of responsibility that the addict is running from. The trick, therefore, is surely not increase people's fears of what happens when they don't behave responsibly, but to make the responsible aspect of their lives a more attractive place to be, so that they instinctively re-balance in the right direction.

The odds are stacked against this being achievable. Not only is 'responsible life' a fairly troublesome place for many people, delaing with financial worries, inadequate housing, unruly children, sick relatives and so on, but the same political and media circus that criticises our irresponsibility also contrives to make the responsible world seem so fractious, tense, gloomy and ultimately doomed that there's very little temptation to get any more involved in it than we already are.

Surely this comes back to Adam Philips's happiness argument. Making the responsible world a happy place might be unrealistic, but making it an interesting place must be entirely possible. If we found living responsibly, empathically and sustainably an interesting, absorbing activity, instead of a chore, then we'd want to spend more time doing it.

Recently a commentator drew on the great environmentalist and technophile Douglas Adams, in countering claims that online social networking was destroying meaningful communication. This argument ran that for a relatively short period of humanity communication has been a one-way street, in which the printing, radio and television ages have broadcast messages to anyone who will listen, but done very little listening in return. I'm doing this now: I have no idea whether anyone will ever read this! What's more, professional journalists always tend to choose their own version of reality and find research and opinion to back it up. By contrast, for all its amateurism, social networking represents the globalisation of one-to-one and many-to-many conversations, with a whole new demand for self-regulating etiquette that people are clumsily learning from scratch without teachers or precedent. And they're finding it absorbing, and yes, addictive.

Whenever a social networking site loses its magic, it happens because the 'broadcasters' - advertisers, record companies, news corporations, have taken over the space that site occupies in people's lives. The public simply zone out and move onto another network.

Uncomfortable though this may be, especially for professionals, the solutions to so many big, intractable challenges, such as fragmented societies, terrorism, unsustainability, anti-social behaviour, may well lie in a world of uncontrolled conversations, momentary experience and addiction. The conversations in social networking cover the full range of views, from cringingly right-on to unpalatably right-wing, from politically correct to offensively hilarious. But I'm pretty sure one factor unifying them all will be a disdain for authority. Most people are quietly rebellious.

Making the world sustainable is not about promoting responsible, clean, well-mannered living. To live more sustainably, more healthily, more ethically, more frugally: these need to be the stuff of everyday acts of quiet rebellion and casual addiction. That is where fun, friendship, creativity and entrepreneurism are born. Ants can be well-organised, but only humans can enjoy being rebellious.

Psychocycle

I've recently become a cyclist. By this I mean that although I've probably owned one bike or another, on and off, for about half my adult life, I've never used one as a mode of regular transport until the last couple of months. My motivations were partly about getting more exercise, but also very practical. I have been making regular journeys recently for which bike is definitely the best option: walking takes too long, the bus is no quicker and costs a fortune, driving means finding somewhere to park.

Today the word 'psychogeography' came back to me via the radio, and it's timely, because there's definitely a psychogeography for each mode of travel. Cycling puts you in curious netherworld between pedestrians and drivers. Neither pavements nor roads are particularly well-suited to cycling, and the best way to negotiate a city by bike is to use bits of both. You can plod around with and between pedestrians, or put your foot down and keep up with the belching traffic. You have to be on high alert. There is always a risk that drivers won't make allowances for you, but a much greater tendency for pedestrians not to notice you and walk out in front of you, so you have to do all the noticing. More specifically, you learn a new knowledge of your city based on which gear to be in for which gradient, which streets to avoid because they're too steep to climb, where the dropped kerbs are, where the potentially capsizing potholes are, which traffic lights to approach slowly and which to hurtle towards at full tilt, and so on. Gradually you realise that you carry different mental maps of the same place, depending on the mode of travel you happen to be using at the time.

Today's really interesting experience has been going back to walking for a day, after several days of cycling. Suddenly it dawns on you that while walking is mode of travel, it is also a way of living - in a way that no other mode can really live up to - because only when you're walking can you really notice the world around you as space, rather than as route. You can observe, for example, how the demolition of a building has opened up a new vista of a street, and let a little extra light into that part of the city. That sets you off wondering what will happen to the demolition site. The law of averages suggests that within a few months there'll be a building of even less architectural merit than its predecessor and with at least as much skill at cutting out views and light. What if it were remodelled as a public space? What would the space be used for? How would the city make such a space an economically viable proposition? Would it make the city a better, more civilised place, or would it become a haven for shabby fellows contemplating their fate with a bottle of Buckfast Tonic Wine? Is building more shiny buildings, hiring armies of high-visibility 'city ambassadors' and imposing no-drink zones really an effective way to treat the Buckfasters?

Back to the reassuring whirr of chains, gears and tyres. Enough contemplation.

AW.

Youth of today, eh?

I'm currently reading Consumer Kids: how big business is grooming our children for profit, by Ed Mayo and Agnes Nairn. The premise is that a range of companies selling things kids tend to like, for example sugary foods, clothes and computer games are being ever more inventive in worming their way into children's lives. Particularly useful to them seems to be developing loyalty to brands as soon as, or even before, children become consumers, so that these early habits continue to influence their buying choices when they get older.

It's entirely plausible and, I have no doubt, true. The bit that trouble me is, can we say for sure if this is a good, bad, or indifferent development in society?

The authors seem confident that it's a bad idea to condition children so early as consumers. But what if we were conditioning them to be sustainable consumers? Surely it's the principle that sustainability thinkers have been pushing for years. Get kids into the idea that wasteful products, excessive food miles, over-packaging and so on are bad things, and recycling, renewable energy and local produce are good things, and walking and cycling are cooler than driving. Then these values will stay with them as they grow up and gradually society will become more sustainable on a generational basis. Furthermore, they can pester their parents and grandparents to be more sustainable too. Good? Good.

So here's the rub: if the brainwashing of children was being pursued for morally splendid consumer choices, we'd probably be quite relaxed. But consumer choices that skirt the suburbs of repugnance are highly lucrative, and therefore are the ones more prone to trying out a spot of expensive subliminal messaging. In other words, we're making a value judgement as to what children should be brainwashed about, rather than whether or not brainwashing is a good idea.

I'm not sure it stacks up. I'll just get another [insert branded sugary drink here] and then see if I can work it out.

AW.

A million carbon calculators later, here I am

OK - it's time to tackle my own carbon impacts.

Sorry to get your hopes up. I can't actually begin to analyse the dozens of carbon calculators that have popped up all over the internet, but the question is, can I really understand even one of them?

Keen to become a bit more practical about my own carbon footprint, I decided to start with two sources I know of and would rely on: The Energy Saving Trust , and WWF's Counting Consumption Report. EST has a nice calculator that you can personalise and explore its assumptions. Counting Consumption looks at the UK-wide effects of consumption.

My EST carbon footprint is a mixed bag: my total is 7.86 tonnes per year, compared to a national average of 10.23 tonnes. My home energy (heating and cooking) impact is a bit below average and my use of appliances is relatively high, but my transport footprint is less than half the national average.

Is this good news or bad news?

Well, transport-wise it seems to be good news, because I don't drive much and I achieved my low figure despite generously allowing myself one short-haul return flight per year and one long-haul return flight per two years, which is probably a bit more flying than I actually do. Basically, my transport impact is low because I don't commute by car.

I'm a little irked by my appliance footprint, because all my white goods are A-rated, I don't have a TV and I turn appliances off when not using them. I suspect that it's my IT appliances that cause the spike, partly because my lack of commuting means I use computers more at home, and partly because the calculator may assume my household is using all its computing power simultaneously, which it rarely does. Nevertheless, if I am to rely on EST's calculator then appliance usage must be something to look at.

Home energy-wise, the bad news is that the things I can readily do are limited, either by lifestyle or cost. Because I work from home, my heating is often on in the daytime: I've done some work on zoning my heating so that I'm not heating the whole house to the same temperature, but the scope for reducing the heating time is scuppered. I already have double-glazing and a (fairly) modern boiler, so the real energy gains are to be found in increasing the insulation. Since I'm in a solid wall house, that not only means cost but also disruption. I'm still chasing draughts around, and that must always be a priority. The EST calculator tells me that insulation my loft could save me 1 tonne of carbon per year, which would actually reduce my home energy footprint to not much over half the national average. I have an attic room in my loft, so it would mean lining the walls and redecorating, but that just might be do-able this year.

Since appliances seem to be a problem for my household, I'm going to invest in one of those electricity usage monitors and conduct some scientific experiments on how to reduce this aspect of consumption.

So, starting from having a carbon footprint 77% of the national average, if I could wipe one tonne off my heating impacts and maybe save 20% of my appliance impacts (another 500kg) that would mean I'd made an overall 20% reduction in my own carbon footprint and would be running at 62% of national average (unless everyone else made reductions at a similar rate). This would make my household quite a low-carbon one, would it not?

Well, yes and no. For a start, I have identified 20% of savings but baulked at making much in the way of further reductions, so it's doubtful that I'd successfully continue to make carbon cuts. This is particularly relevant when my commuting impacts are minimal, because if my circumstances changed and I founded I needed to start commuting, that could easily wipe out the other gains I've made.

However, if we look at Counting Consumption we learn that in terms of ecological footprint (of which carbon accounts for about half) then our footprint per capita for food is roughly the same as that for our home and energy. So, by some crude extrapolation of the two information sources I've selected (to avoid delving into the many sources of more accurate information we could look at), we could estimate that my household's food-related carbon impact is about 4 tonnes of carbon per year. Bearing in mind that I try to avoid wasting food, don't each much processed food, do eat out quite often, grow a few of my own vegetables but would be very hard-pressed to give up eating meat, I suspect I need to do some more detailed calculations. But the real, revealing question would be, how much food (and drink) footprint could I save without noticeably giving anything up?

Over the coming months I'm going to test a hypothesis on the basis of my own lifestyle. My hypothesis is kind of threefold:

1) that there is a threshold level of personal, consumption-side carbon emissions that it is very difficult to get below, perhaps somewhere around 6 tonnes per capita per year, without a substantial change in the energy supply mix away from carbon sources;

2) that it is possible to measure and act upon personal influences on supply-side emissions, eg from energy, food, material and transport services, by focusing on the way personal behaviour affects their efficiency and impacts;

3) that this could change the way personal impact is measured and acted upon in the round.

Let's see if I can do it....

AW.

Travel news from Ethical Man

A blog that is well worth following is the BBC's Ethical Man, Justin Rowlatt http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ethicalman/

I was prompted by his recent blog post about our transport emissions to do a little thinking of my own.

Rowlatt was trying - bravely if I may say so - to make a cold-hearted assessment of the relative carbon emission impacts of different modes of travel, and to dispel some of the lazy assumptions. So, for example he found that, on a grammes of carbon per passenger kilometre, one person in a car, a virtually-empty bus or a half-empty train were all at least as bad as flying; and that if you travelled everywhere in a fully laden car you would be giving half-empty trains a real run for their money.

His 'good science' message was, don't just assume that getting a train is a lower carbon option, but think about the full picture. He also had a 'pragmatic logic' message, which was that we should use public transport anyway, because the services will run anyway and by using them we are removing our car emissions and also reducing the emissions per passenger kilometre of the bus or train, by increasing its patronage.

In a sense, I'm with Ethical Man on this, but his rather easy answers to tricky questions left me uncomfortable. After all, isn't "it was going anyway, with or without me" a stock excuse for taking a flight? Hell, I've used it myself. Sure, there's a difference, because if a scheduled flight was regularly empty the airline would withdraw the service, whereas buses and trains are specifically obliged to run services during low-demand times in order to maintain the concept of 'public transport'.

In reality, of course, trains in the UK are becoming so stretched for capacity that finding one that's half-empty is quite an achievement, and pricing structures have been cleverly (if irritatingly) designed to spread passengers across off-peak times. Buses are a bit different, because they do often run quite empty but also seem to burst unhelpfully at the seams whenever there is anything approaching a rush-hour.

Anyway, Ethical Man's analysis set me thinking: perhaps counting our grammes per passenger kilometre isn't actually the best way for us to plan on how to reduce our carbon emissions. Although on the face of it it's the most straightforward calculation, when you look at the variables (how efficient is my car, how full is the train, was the plane going anyway, etc) it's pretty difficult to say with confidence that we've made the best choice for the journey in question.

For a start, the greenest way to make a journey is of course not to make it at all, but that can be inconvenient or just rather unsatisfying. "Darling, let's go out somewhere today - how about going to the market in Buxton?" "No dear, think of the carbon emissions. Let's stay in and watch the lettuces growing in the garden."

No, the more I think about it, the way to think about transport emissions is to think of transport not as a series of thousands of individual choices, but as - dare I say it - a service. Let's say there's a train service running every hour between Sheffield and Leeds for 20 hours a day, with space for 200 passengers. 5 of those trains are full, 10 are half-full and 5 are virtually empty. So 20 trains are transporting just over 2000 passengers. Immediately we can see that spreading passengers from full trains onto half-empty ones won't make any difference. There are only three ways of reducing the per-passenger carbon emissions of the service:

1) carry more passengers in total;

2) make the trains more carbon efficient themselves;

3) withdraw low-demand trains from the service.

The third option is controversial and potentially counter-productive in the long-term, so even though it looks like an inefficiency it may be worth putting up with. The first two options are not controversial but do require all sorts of imaginative solutions, such as how to get commuters to travel at different times instead of travelling by car, and how to make railway vehicles more carbon efficient without vast expense on new rolling stock.

Thinking of each mode of transport as a service to society, rather than as myriad separate choices, has to be helpful, because you can start to see the particulars of each mode. For example in the road-freight industry there must be huge opportunities to tackle the problem of vehicles running empty on return trips: you could actually increase volumes of freight movement and reduce transport-related emissions simultaneously.

Now, how do we apply this to private cars?.....

AW.

Can Science Save Us?

...which reminds me - I recommend anyone in the Sheffield vicinity visits the 'Can Art Save Us?' exhibition at the Millenium Galleries. I may do another blog about it when I'm in the mood.

In my last blog entry I aired some thinking about the ways people believe or disbelieve climate science.

Coincidentally my wife and Green Empire co-director has just started reading Ben Goldacre's book, Bad Science. Visit his website http://www.badscience.net/ The book is basically about health science (or lack thereof) in the media and in marketing of health foods, supplements, cosmetics etc. We've all laughed at TV ads for shampoo with added pro-hypo-filamentorium-12. (Well, I hope we have).

Goldacre's premise is this: people who stand to make vast amounts of money have a habit of concocting misrepresented, bogus or simply invented scientific cases for the health benefits of their products, as well as being, erm, wide of the mark about their own qualifications. (Favourite quote: "Dr Gillian McKeith PhD or, to give her her full medical title, Gillian McKeith....") These products usually turn out to be ineffectual or might, in some cases, actually be harmful. Goldacre's answer is simply: live well, exercise, eat well, and be highly sceptical of apparently scientific claims unless you genuinely understand them.

Now, don't get me wrong - I am not, repeat not, a climate change sceptic. In fact I am worried to near paralysis when I read detailed papers on climate science, and so often avoid reminding myself of how bad things might actually be, for fear of being driven to drink. (Fortunately the pub is 40 seconds walk away so I don't need a chauffeur in any case).

If, on the other hand, I drew all my climate change evidence from the same newspapers, TV programmes and internettage that promote the kind of cod science about health that Ben Goldacre rightly despairs of, I would probably be wise to be suspicious.

In other words, what people tend not to trust is not so much the facts, as the sources. The impressionable amongst us will believe in climate change one week, and dismiss it the next, depending on what they've most recently read or seen on the telly. The more cautious of us will be generally doubtful until they see closely argued and referenced science - and you really, really hav to go looking for that. Especially since a lot of scientific papers are written in a language so dense that, well, you need to be scientist to spot the difference between the kosher and the kodswallop.

We have nurtured a generation that divides into the gullible and the cynical. That climate science appears to inspire doubt is, in this context, probably a good thing, since it implies that people are taking the issue seriously and will become passionate about tackling climate change once they are given impartial evidence from sources they trust.

In my work with WWF a few months ago I found that the ordinary people we interviewed craved impartial, robust information and despaired that they couldn't find it. All information in the public domain is assumed to be biased by political and/or financial motives.

We should put our faith in the wisdom of these ordinary people and do them the service of providing trustworthy information.

AW.