Why I stopped saving the world.

The Green Shed Builds

Things aren’t what they used to be. To be enthusiastic about environmental protection was to be the outsider. To spend your time and skills on sustainability was a rare calling. To devote your life to saving the world would be to face a terrible foe against which victory seemed unlikely.

Back in the 1990s I had completed a degree in aerospace design and had specialised in aerodynamics. Rather than continue directly into the design of aircraft, I took a diversion. I discovered a path just off the beaten track that wound into terrain that was unfamiliar. My main skill is rampant curiosity, and this serves me well even today. So, I took this road less travelled to see where it might lead.

Pursuing a doctorate in saving the world.

I was offered the opportunity to predict the future. Specifically, the option to pursue a PhD arose in which the motion and chemistry of atmospheric gasses was to be modelled and predicted.

The whole exercise had roots in the 1986 meltdown of Chernobyl. A vast cloud of radioactive chemistry was released into the air, and groups devoted to disaster response needed to evacuate, warn, decontaminate or at least monitor every town and city in its path.

This was no small task. This cloud was huge, could blow in any direction and in days could be on the other side of the globe. You couldn't just attend to every direction at once. Should this happen again, disaster response would need tools to tell them where this toxic horror was going.

Therefore, we had to make predictions fast. Very fast indeed. Within hours, and in detail. To this end I deployed an armoury of mathematical tricks to accelerate this prediction.

I enjoyed every second of this academic marathon, in which I worked all day, stayed up most nights and worked on into the early morning. Good times with a singular focus. People flatter themselves with the label of multitasker, but there is much to be said for the singular focus of the monotasker.

Planning for a future beyond academia, in which I might save the world.

My research neared its end and I had to start thinking about my future. Rather than return to my aerospace roots, it seemed that I might quite like to continue saving the world.

I made enquiries, and this is where the trouble started.

In the 1990s the corporate giants had not yet recognised that to express a concern for sustainability might gain them some appreciation from the paying public. Big business had not yet fully greenwashed their operations. At the time, it seemed that the environmental lobby remained their staunch foe.

This meant only one thing. If I was to devote my life to saving the world, for every one of me, there would be 10 lawyers lined up to argue against any case I might offer. For every treaty for which I might argue, an army of corporate suits would advance upon means to circumvent any restriction upon their operations. For every technology that I might devise to offer an alternative means to raise cleaner power, cohorts of salesmen would be knocking at the customer’s door to offer cheaper, more powerful but polluting alternatives. For every bit of research in which I might wish to engage, I knew I would be fighting tooth and nail for every scrap of funding.

A loss of faith.

Meanwhile, corporate, legal and government pressure was indeed being applied to some green initiatives. Some progress was being made. However, they all seemed, and still seem, like financial scams.

Carbon credits were all the rage. Apparently, all we needed to do was invent a new form of currency called a carbon credit, recast this currency as actually a worthy legislative limit, allocate credit to our buddies and then start trading them on the open exchange for cold hard cash.

If you are a large and polluting industry, you exchange your credits with some small poor country who produces no pollutants because they can produce absolutely nothing, and you can keep polluting as much as you like. It was the 1990s equivalent to the gold rush that is the dubious investments made in carbon sequestering that we see today.

In the face of all this I lost the faith. I gave up. I returned to aerospace design and became a corporate drone myself. I’m not going to regret this. At the time, to pursue environmental technologies seemed like a hopeless calling, and I wasn’t prepared to service a mortgage and bring up kids whilst fighting a losing battle.

Corporate greenwashing.

And there the story might have ended, if those corporate bodies intent upon gaming the system had not switched sides. Thirty years later, and those lawyers and industrialists to whom I had offered my surrender now firmly held the very passion that I once pursued.

Corporations have painted themselves in a green so bright that you can see it from space.

Sprawling fields of deep black and expensive solar panels stamped out by great factories. Towering masts of gleaming white windmills harvest electricity from airflow that I once modelled in my computer. Plush, sophisticated and autonomous electric cars glide by.

This might all seem like great progress, to which I do try to offer my support. However, as I wonder at these vast solar farms, wind turbines and electric cars, the new solution looks so very much like the old. Giant factories grind out gleaming technologies wrought from exotic materials mined from valuable terrain that must be protected at all costs.

I can’t help but wonder if, rather than saving the world, in my support of the current crop of complex and expensive technologies all I’m really doing is simply transferring my dependence upon power from one vast corporate entity to another, whilst everything else remains pretty much the same.

Will future conflicts be to secure the security of supply for those exotic materials and components required to build these modern wonders? Will the rivalry between corporate competitors produce the sustainable solution that we desire, or simply build the competitive solution that wins this commercial conflict?

Curiosity takes hold once more.

All this makes me wonder, what would it take to develop sustainable technology without recourse to vast corporate support? Is it possible, in the construction of sustainable technology, to divest entirely from the industrial technologies and supporting systems that cause the harm?

Can supply chains be shortened to the minimum, to construct the desired technology from the most commonly found materials, tools and expertise?

Could such technology be easily copied by others, with little need for skills, tools and investment and therefore proliferate without the support of industrial interests.

A little technical exercise. Nothing big. By definition, a backyard experiment costing little in money and materials.

An opportunity to engage once more in saving the world.

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