I’ve just returned from Brazil, where I was attending Sao Paulo fashion Week and giving a talk about sustainability, which was the theme of this year’s premier South American fashion extravaganza. It’s not exactly news that sustainability has begun to infuse glamour industries, after the release of “green issues” for nearly every glossy magazine last year, but seeing the way environmental and social responsibility were embraced in putting on this event nevertheless brought me a surprising sense of encouragement about the whole global shift towards sustainable practices.

I was introduced to William McDonough and his book Cradle to Cradle by Jane while working with her on this project. It is a fantastic book that seems to aim to change the way the reader thinks more than teach a lesson.

I just listened to a talk he gave a few years back on the Social Innovation Conversations podcast that is an excellent introduction to his ideas and way of thinking. It’s definitely worth the hour listen.

I’ve been putting word out in a few different places about this upcoming “teach-in” for design students to learn about their responsibility, as they move into professional careers, to consider the planet and climate change unconditionally in their work. Hopefully some of the Climate commons readers will find this useful.

Ed Mazria is a committed pioneer on the frontier of climate-conscious building. His Architecture 2030 agenda has gained recognition this year as an exemplary model for pushing a rapid and radical shift towards better building strategies. Now, like many people who understand the immediacy of this problem, Mazria is aiming at the target with the greatest potential to turn this misguided ship around: students. Specifically, design students.

The 2010 Imperative Global Emergency Teach-In is a free one-day event scheduled to be webcast on February 20, 2007, from noon to 3:30pm EST. The session aims to reach at least half a million students, faculty, deans and practicing professionals in North and South America, hopefully making one simultaneous splash that will send ripples of reconsideration and activism through the design community.

“There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?” -Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Ecological history underscores our terrestrial issues. How much and how fast has the climate changed? How far are such changes man-induced? Is nature in balance? Are humans helpless to stem — or bound to alter — natural processes? Has humanity on the whole improved or spoiled the Earth? In what sense do environmental misuse and reform matter? Today’s ecological concerns trigger these essentially historical questions. Save for the subject of oppressed minorities, no aspect of history is currently so resurgent as that of the environment. Past historians habitually disjoined nature from history. As recently as 1984, Donald Worster found “little history in the study of nature, and little nature in the study of history”. history –the annals of civilization — is derived from recollections and written records. By contrast, erudition of nature — Earth and Cosmos — emerged from material residues, theoretical logic, and verifying research. history was a humanistic enterprise, ecology a scientific one. Analogies abounded, “the book of nature” was a common cliche, and historical “science” was recurrently trendy. But most scholars stressed the disparate temporal horizons, subject matter, and sources of the two realms and slighted their parallels. Nature was mundane and mindless, history the sublime drama of human will. To be sure, historians never forgot that men and women required terrestrial abodes for food and shelter, even for sanctuary and faith. And the reciprocal influences of locale and life perennially intrigue chroniclers. At least since Herodotus, historians have invoked landscape and terrain, climate and soils to explain why peoples and nations differ. In the Western world, human dominion over nature was decreed by the deity and lent added impetus by Enlightenment science. While ecologists doggedly termed nature mankind’s master, devotees of advancement saw nature as mankind’s servant. Thus design should fit within nature not enslave it. Design, like the Thoreaus’ bird nest, is in tune with the narrative of place. design cannot be seperate from its history. BUT much of design history does not consider nature directly. What next???