Video Reflection on 11th Hour

Mother Fu**** that was a scary video. It was like a compilation of just destruction after destruction after destruction… If I have to watch that again I think I’m gonna get a vasectomy. Wow, I knew the world was in a bad shape but I didn’t think it was on the verge of annihilating itself. Plus, the way they showed it, I feel like everything we’re doing is wrong and I mean everything… including just breathing. But I watched this video like 3 days ago, since then, everything I do makes me feel so damn guilty. I even watched the news today and they had a story about the government or the Forest department who’s planning to cut down trees for logging where the koalas lived. Their argument were like “oh no we’re only gonna start cutting on the western side of the forest where no Koalas were found” and I thought that was such a load of crap and they’re doing it to support the local industries apparently.

Then I remembered what the people in the 11^th hour said, they said how “Our attitude is based on selfishness, economics, and politics” and “today, ecosystems, rivers, streams, lakes, forests, they have no rights, they’re property, can be bought, sold, traded, carved or destroyed” and it’s soooo true, how come I didn’t realise this before? It was like 0_o. Who are these people to cut down the trees that have been there for longer than we have? Who are WE to kill a tree, whose life is probably worth more because it is doing MORE for the planet in its lifetime compared to us who are just sucking the planet dry of its resources just for being alive? Then they also calculated that it’ll cost us “35 trillion dollars a year to do what nature is doing for us for nothing, when all the economies of the world only total to 18 trillion dollars. So nature is doing twice as much as the economy is doing for us.” This is craziness. And what’s even more depressing is the fact that one of guy said 99.9999% (he even emphasised the 4 digits decimals) of all species which have ever existed on earth is extinct. Meaning, the way we’re going in this “death based cycle” we’re not only going to extinct ourselves, but also ALL life on earth. That’s pretty terrifying isn’t it?

So more importantly, why are we facing this problem? One of the points emphasised throughout the video is the problem lies with the way we think, it’s not a “waste problem, it’s not a global warming problem, it’s not a pollution problem…” It’s fundamentally a culture problem where we think ourselves as superior and separate from nature, like we’re “King of Nature” as if we’ve been given dominion over nature and every other living being like they have no worth other than being a resource for us. Well, that was pretty much true, we do think that way and that’s why we can buy food from supermarkets and throw out plastic packaging to the waste bin without feeling any guilt or even thinking that we’re putting toxic chemicals of that plastic bags that’s eventually going to kill our crops and we’re all gonna starve to death.

Then the second problem, we’re relying WAY too much on fossil fuel dubbed as “ancient sunlight” which I thought was a pretty apt description of it now that I think about it. Sub-problem, it’s gonna run out… meaning we’re gonna be scrambling for new energy to feed the 6 billion people we’ve reproduced ourselves to when in reality, the sun itself, can only feed and support 1 to 2 billion people at the most. So what’s gonna happen? Well 2/3 of us are gonna die a slow painful death if we don’t change NOW and that’s only, did I mention only?, if the Earth can recover from all the desertification that’s going rampage at the moment. Another sub-problem, all the digging up and the burning of those fossil fuel is leading to global warming that’s holy crap warming the earth by a few degrees. That’s going to throw us into something like the planet of Mars with no water because those few degrees is going to stop the ocean recycling its water with fresh ones from the water on the bottom of the ocean and the surface is going to turn stagnant. Then we’re ALL going to die, not just 2/3 of us.

So what’s the solution to all these other than we should all die and leave the planet in peace? Well the designers said, we should design with a philosophy of “cradle to cradle” design, meaning all the products we used is 100 percent reused and no resources should be wasted unlike the current situation where “For every truckload of products that we use, 32 truckloads of waste are produced.” So we definitely have to get rid of this “waste making system” and replace it with and if not zero then almost zero waste system just like it was millions of years ago before humans over run this place.

The other important thing designers can contribute to is design using clean, renewable energy. This will definitely reduce our carbon footprint, by reducing pollution, reducing our use of limited resources so we can share those resources with other living systems that are currently in decline. Our obligation is then to make sure what we design are also produced in a manner that is no destructive to those philosophies, e.g. using a huge amount of energy in manufacturing for products that supposedly offset carbon footprint in use. That’s not going to help cos it’s overall life cycle is still going to be shit.

One other thing, I think it’s pretty cool when the woman mentioned how spiders can develop string 5 times stronger than steel in room temperature, without using petroleum. So part of the solution to all this should be pursuing designs by biomimicry since nature do everything the best way anyway, why not learn those things that’s been developed since the evolution with the Big Bang. Maybe, just maybe, if we do all those things right, there’ll be a chance that less than 99.9999% of the species including us in the next 100 years or so, won’t be extinct, except maybe cockroaches, they can survive anything anyway so I don’t think we need to worry about them too much.