Task 3: 11th hour

After watching The 11^th Hour, I sent the link to my friend who is the complete opposite of a naturalist. Unfortunately, it seems that most are unaware of such human consequences on our environment.

This documentary has the most of the overwhelming facts about our environment.

Just a few of them:

• We have lost 90% of the big fish in the sea in half a century

• With global warming we potentially could make the whole surface ocean stagnant- last time that happened more than 95% of all the species on the earth went extinct

• The UN estimates that by the middle of the century there will be a hundred and fifty million refugees at any given time due to climate change

• 99.9999% of all animals that ever existed are extinct

• Using off-the-shelf technologies, which we already have, we could reduce the human footprint by 90%

It is depressing to be known as the “nature lover” in my group of friends when I am not in any position to be granted that title according to my ecological footprint. I would like to be more sustainable in the way in which I live my everyday life, but there are so many forces driving me away from that. The question is how can I change my lifestyle without changing my lifestyle, you know? Which brings me back to a quote from the video, “Humans are conditioned by 2 essential characters- one is opportunism and the other is greed”.

Something that I thought was really cool sounding was the micro restoration using mushroom mycelium in order to heal environments. This type of research just shows that there are ways in which we can be helping our environment in very simplistic, natural ways. David Suzuki asked in the video: “What would it cost us to take carbon dioxide out of the air and put oxygen back in it? Which is what all the green things do for us for nothing.”

Like they said in the video, food is becoming poisoned and it is to the point where we should worry about it. But WHY don’t we worry about it? Because humans=greed. And like Kenny Ausubel said in the video, “The greatest weapon of mass destruction is corporate economic globalization”. I don’t want my design to be the cause of corporate gain. Thus we must redesign design itself. Because “all of life is a design project today. We have to design the capacity to sustain life in the long run”.