What we can learn from Alice

As children our imaginations guide us away from reality and into a new fantastical world.  However, as we mature we often lose sight of our inner child as realities of life creep upon us and squash our imaginative nature.  This leaves us with quite the conundrum as we hear our mother earth echo the same requests again and again.  If we stop and listen, we can hear her whispers: “Help us make the world right again”.  “Will you be my champion”?   We say in rebuttal of the current state of sustainability, “this is impossible”.  She slowly shakes her head in disagreement and says, “Only if you believe it is”.

More often than I’d like to admit my mind wonders off one topic to an entirely new one within seconds. For example, while watching the video, Suzanne Lee on Ted.com, I realized on the screen behind Ms. Lee was this statement: The rediscovery of wonder.  Instantly my mind was transported to the cartoon, Alice in Wonderland.  In the cartoon, the creation of such a fantastical place alone plays a vital role in our concept of visioneering a sustainable future.  Our vision should be a fantastical one, but we are trumped by harsh realities that make it difficult to see beyond the current state of our world. 

In the video, Suzanne Lee talks of how she has scientifically reinvented a process for developing clothing. This would mean utilizing the IE principle, Design for the Environment from the book, “Closing the Loops in Commerce: A Business run like a Redwood Forest”.  Or more importantly this would mean design WITH the environment. By manipulating the process of an organism’s growth, she is able to sustainably grow her own clothing.  She has proved her system can work, and even sports a vest made from the tea and sugar base.  She is a pioneer of what it means to take a fantastical concept and grow it (literally) into an obtainable reality.

If we can grow our own products, then we can produce locally.  Cutting down on transportation cost, as well as, the use of crude oil.  By applying the concept of “clothes miles” we can see the foot print of consumption in the textile industry. In the article, Sustainable Fashion and Textiles, Kate Fletcher suggests a principle I would like to adopt as my own: Locally made, globally relevant. Promoting a viable option to global production.  Through this concept there is a celebration of localism, a pride in what one can produce.  We each know the status of our current environment.  We must now envision ways to use the bio-systems we know so well to develop new concepts for textiles.  This vision encompasses my second principle of IE, Optimize rather than Maximize.  Through locally grown products we can produce quality over quantity as our imaginations are stretched.  Also consumers are more aware of what it took to produce the product, therefore are more likely to partake in recycling.

Which brings me to my third principle, Using Waste as a Resource.  It is an exciting time as we see our current use of technology taking us to places we could only imagine before.  One of those end places means utilizing waste.  In the text Midcourse Correction, Ray Anderson suggests that this means we return to our traditional notion of waste.  This is a notion that innovates use for even the most “unusable” items.  For buildings, this can mean generating electricity from landfill waste and pollution.  In the article, Textile Futures, Bradley Quinn suggest this concept must also mean developing a system that solves the abundant post consumer waste while minimizing water pollution and chemical waste.

There is a place, like no place on earth.  Some say to survive it, you need to be as mad as a hatter.  So let us take these principles and become mad.  Let us retrieve our inner child and envision a fantastically real place where we each can make a difference in changing our world.  If within a 3 minute video we can be transported to a new world, why is it so difficult to envision a new world for ourselves?  The three principles discussed trickle to one concept.  This concept is the rediscovery of wonder.  Through wonder we can dream of possible solutions, such as growing our own clothes.  Through wonder we can seek a world where we produce locally.  Through wonder, we can take garbage and produce power.  Through wonder, we can do anything.  All you have to do is believe.