The dog ate the newspaper ...it made him sick! Me too!

16 June 2007
Clifton
Ruminations on building …

Rainy. The dog is running around the house in ever decreasing circles. Earlier he munched placidly on last week’s newpapers, digesting headlines about events that have been overtaken in sensation by disasters that seem to be ever worse.

Time for another coffee. I’m working away on spread sheets for our Spanish projects and will later try to catch up with my correspondence.

I’ve set the mindless talking head volume to nearly zero so that the TV behind me is just a droning noise, like that of some nameless buzzing insect, circling your chaise longue on a summer’s afternoon whilst you, eyes closed, enjoy that precious space between being awake and being asleep – the crepuscle of consciousness. The buzzing is not so annoying as it is reassuring; there is a tangible world to return to when you reach out into that mental space you’re floating in, and retrieve your persona, jerking yourself back into the existence that includes family, job, responsibility and the evening glass of wine.

Penumbra – nice word, derived, I believe, from more recent Latin, means ‘shadow’, particularly the shadow of the earth on the moon when there is an eclipse.

This rain up in the north of England that closed out the working week worries me. I didn’t pick up precisely where it was located but the weathercaster said that many places had received a month’s rain in less than a day. In America the draught is the worst in many places since the dust-bowl years of the 1930’s. Is there a link? I’m inclined to think there may be. But, then, I just read Clive Hamilton’s comments on George Monbiot’s ‘Heat’ in the New Left Review; if we don’t take this 2 degree limit seriously, we’re going to kill a lot of people. It isn’t a matter of PC, it’s going to be a crime against humanity to fly unless you absolutely have to; to jet down to the costas for a weekend is going to make you an accessory to murder! We’re staring in to the abyss my friends!

Coffee’s ready, back to work. I’ve got a world to save. We are going to have to construct as much built space in the next five decades as we did in the previous 4,000 years if we’re to have a hope of providing decent dwellings for all nine billion of us (our total by the middle of the century if we don’t get hit by an asteroid or burden our natural system to the point that it can no longer self-regulate and spiral into an unknown, planet-killing climatic decline).

To build all of these new dwellings, we will have to adapt our construction methods to the realities of a world in which, if we are to survive, we do much more with much less. We cannot afford just to rip the guts out of the earth, consuming all of our natural resources in some two decade long building frenzy – two decades because that’s how long our easily recoverable reserves of many key metals and other resources will last if we continue to live like there’s no tomorrow (which there won’t be).

So, we have to build carefully, using local, abundant materials, we have to build carefully, keeping our real-time carbon footprint as narrow as we can and we have to build for a long time in order to amortise the inherent energy content of the new constructions over a reasonable period. This is important – we must build to last. If we build for 30 years, you just divide the energy input by 30. You get a much larger number than if you divide that same energy input (or, as we plan, a much smaller one) by a much larger life, say 500 years (which is not so difficult to do – just travel around some of Europe’s older villages).