RE: [GBlist] house thoughts

["Ralph Bicknese" <ralph.bicknese@christnerinc.com>]

David:

I have tremendous respect for Donella H. Meadows and take her writings to
heart.  I will have to find the article you mentioned.

Last Februaruy I spoke with William McDonough and the work he had recently
embarked on with Ford Motor Company on the redesign of Ford's Rouge River
plant.  Bill said he felt it was possible to reduce the energy and materials
input that goes into manufacturing an automobile by 5000 times.  That is
FIVE-THOUSAND.  I remain stunned.

This example is intended to show what is possible.   McDonough and company
examined the entire chain of manufacture from extracting the raw materials
to assembling a car to reusing the fragments remaining after the initial
process.

Let us admit that it is possible the extremely intelligent Mr. McDonough is
off little in his calculations and it is only possible to reduce the input
by 500 times. What then?  Even if one could reduce the input by a factor of
50 imagine how it would revolutionize the automobile industry.  Imagine the
impact on all other industries.  Imagine how much cleaner the world would
be.  The possibilities are truly amazing even if the inputs could be reduced
by a factor of 10.

Let us hope that Ford has the wisdom and guts to go ahead with this kind of
revolutionary process. I can hardly wait to see the results.

Cheers,
Ralph Bicknese



-----Original Message-----
From: Sarah Holland/David Foley [mailto:hollandfoley@acadia.net]
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 4:05 PM
To: Greenbuilding
Subject: Re: [GBlist] house thoughts

on 01/10/2002 1:34 PM, Mike Falstad at mfalstad@johnmilnerassociates.com
wrote:

> A while back, I saw an email (perhaps it was on this list) that compared
> several global statistics on standards of living.
> Something like:
> If the world's population was represented by one hundred people... the ten
> wealthiest people live in U.S.; out of 12 TV's, 8 are in U.S., 4 in
> Europe... X amount of houses with plumbing... X amount of cars and what
> country they are in... etc.
> Has anyone on this list seen this? It's a staggering view of the
> distribution of wealth and resources around the world.
> -Michael Falstad

Yes, Michael, I've seen it.  It was originally written years ago by a
friend, the late Donella Meadows, although these days it's usually
attributed to "Anonymous".

I think it would help this discussion immensely if more folks were to read
"Beyond the Limits" by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows and Jorgen
Randers.

We might want to distinguish between the capacity of humans to develop and
enrich their lives, and to use resources more efficiently, with exponential
growth of the physical stuff that flows through the human economy, starting
as natural resources and ending as pollution.  There may be no limit to our
imaginations and capacity to innovate, but there are limits to the
through-put of physical stuff we can run through our economy.  That's just
dictated by physics, but for some reason, pointing this out gets all kinds
of people upset.  Why that should e is an interesting question, but probably
off-topic here.

- David Foley
--
Holland & Foley Building Design L.L.C.
232 Beech Hill Rd.
Northport, Maine 04849 USA
p: (207) 338-9869 f: (207) 338-9859 e: hollandfoley@acadia.net


______________________________________________________________________
This greenbuilding dialogue is sponsored by REPP/CREST, creator of
Solstice http://www.crest.org, and BuildingGreen, Inc., publisher of
Environmental Building News and GreenSpec http://www.BuildingGreen.com
______________________________________________________________________


______________________________________________________________________
This greenbuilding dialogue is sponsored by REPP/CREST, creator of
Solstice http://www.crest.org, and BuildingGreen, Inc., publisher of
Environmental Building News and GreenSpec http://www.BuildingGreen.com
______________________________________________________________________