Are current green initaitives only half measures towards sustainability?

Are current green initiatives only half measures towards sustainability.... merely postponing the inevitable?
Essentially all human activity revolves around the extraction of virgin material, energy production/usage and the generation of waste.
Much of today's 'green' activity focusses on the following:

• Material- Here the focus is keeping things as local as possible and to consume only low energy products. 
• Energy- Here the focus is on producing cleaner power and increasing the usage of renewable energy for our power needs. When it comes to engine fuels, the focus is on moving away from fossil fuels and opting for more non-polluting alternatives like bio-fuels. On the demand end these initiatives have resulted in technology that consume less power or fuel to give us the maximum output.
• Waste- Here the focus is on cleaner non-polluting technologies.

These are well meaning methods towards a greener future, but is it enough to become truly sustainable. That begs the question- what is being truly sustainable? I would imagine that it would mean that we consume material in a manner that there is enough left for posterity... for future generations and other species to live quality lives on this earth. It would also mean that we consume energy/fuel in a manner that there is enough to go by for posterity, or, that any residue of our activities does not result in a toxifying of our air, ground or water.

Now, what would be the steps that we would have to take to ensure that we satisfy the above conditions of sustainability? Let us consider the current 'green' measures:
Materials- By consuming local or consuming low energy products would we meet those conditions? I believe that it all depends on the rate of consumption. The stresses are already showing, with a running out of various stones and timber alternatives, or, the astronomical price increases that we have been seeing. It looks to me that to change to a non-consumerist community would be far more challenging (it's kind of an addiction). The answer would be to reach a near net zero virgin resource consumption situation. The focus would therefore have to be on the development of technologies in nearly all fields that see the use of reused or renewable raw materials. Since at IGH we focus on the built environment, the examples would be along the lines of technology to reuse steel without hampering its brittleness (a result of its carbon content), the making of reconstituted concrete/blocks/tiles that bring the use of cement down to zero, low-energy woody materials/ composites, non-toxic resins and polishes, and so on. Does this mean the end of conventional construction? These are the debating points.... whatever it leads to, one thing is for sure... we would need a radical re-think on the business as usual processes.

Energy- The answer is not whether we should use renewable energy or non-fossil fuel energy. What we ought to be focussing on is whether the overall resources that is used in the production of energy can be sustained for ever? Yes, the sun's energy will last us many millennia, but what about the life of technology like PV... they currently have a shelf life of about 15 to 20 years.... what then? Have we figured out methods to manufacture PV technology in a manner that we dont spend more than what we expect the PV products to produce? Can we design systems that are perennial? What about bio-fuels? Can we be sure that we would have enough land for growing the bio-fuel without eating into our forests or adding pressure on our regular food crops?
Waste- Here is quite a crucial component that defines how badly we have tilted the sustainability balance. Be it materials we use for all production/building activity, or, everything we consume as food and other daily consumables, or the fuel we burn to power our transportation, cities and industry..... we leave something behind. Can we endeavour to work on technology that produces no residue, or, renders all such gaseous, liquid or.solid residue into re-usable materials or inert enough not to cause any problem whatsoever to our air, water or land?

The earth's population is slated to settle around the 10 billion mark. While it means that there would only be that many mouths to feed, another phenomenon, which is the increasing global urban population, would have a pronounced impact on what resources we have left. Along with this comes a greater hunger and greater 'want' from a basic 'need' based society. The pressure will be on us to consume less, and pollute less.... which is as much a measure of attitude/s as it is a challenge for technology. Like I mentioned earlier, the former has led us to where we are... and while we do our utmost to bring change in lifestyles, the focus would equally be on gearing the latter to meet the stringent sustainability demands as mentioned above.

I do agree that current 'green'measures are probably the first steps towards such a change, but it only seems prudent that we know where we are headed and what, at best, will suffice.

Of cursive writing and philosophers…..

While at a recent event around town- I got to see the works of a bunch of …….people. For a change, what I saw was very different from the altars that I pray at and it was after a very long time that I was sitting down to listen to what (according to me are) the 'lesser Gods' had to say.

A lot of their work- and it was quite some bit, with more than eight odd people presenting- seemed like cursive writing, very beautifully written words. Most of these people seemed to have as work, exotically written alphabets with near perfect strokes slanting in the right directions.

My complaint, however, was that when one strung these pretty alphabets together- they didn’t seem to do much beyond forming a well-put-together happy song for kids. Some even bordered on being chirpy clap-along merry little nursery rhymes, but not more. It did not seem to me like they pushed or challenged any existing known paradigm….. and why, you may ask, is that so important !? Well, it is almost the subject matter of another entry- at another time perhaps.

A countable few among those speakers, I thought, sounded like philosophers who unfortunately dint seem to get the attention they deserved.

One of them particularly stood out. His courage to try something new was truly commendable. Sadly, he had a poor handwriting which made his work appear to be a scribbling. It was extremely hard to decipher and this I thought reduced that unsatisfactorily small subscriber base- further. From the murmurs I heard around me in the audience, I knew that what had appeared as an end result had done absolutely no justice to his struggles of experimentation. What I liked was the fact that this philosopher, who had a lot of sensible things to say but no cursive writing to boot, had at least 'tried'.

It brings me back to a discussion we were having around the studio a while ago, an excerpt follows: (Harsha stated it)

'I feel though that this debate about what is ‘good’ architecture as compared to kitsch (read glitzy facades and lots of glass and chrome surfaces) is a bit beyond architecture. One needs to address what people are aspiring for, what they want to be seen as, and so on. After all, architects don’t make projects; clients do (at lease most often). One thing I saw in some one like Anil Laul was that identity, and the ‘good architecture’ can wait; the environment, or more importantly, sustainability needed to be addressed first. Not that I prescribe to this view entirely, but I ask myself- what is more precious to me…. a world where all architecture (or most of it) is pretty and interesting, or, a world where the environmental balance is not tilted. The logic of the latter is over whelming- a pretty world wouldn’t survive for long if it turned its back on the environment.

Having said that, I believe that there is enough room for creating an interesting world with an ecological balance'

In conclusion, one wishes that philosophers wrote more legibly and cursive writers with greater thought.

Lessons learnt for building design from the experience of driving

How many of us have had this experience? Park the car out in the sun and return after a couple of hours.... and we reel back due to the excessive heat within.

To counter this, we do two things:

• One, we park the car in the shade
• Two, we roll down a couple of windows of the car down a crack

In both cases, we have a great level of comfort that is achieved, at least when we compare this to the very first experience. Now let us look at both these changes to the situation closely.

The first instance, where the car was parked in the shade benefited due to the reduction of direct incident radiation. Nothing else changed, only the external environment was modified by introducing an obstruction to the direct sunlight.

The second instance, where the car was parked with the windows slightly down benefited due to the hotter air being vented out from the upper portions of the car, where this internal air is hottest. Nothing here was changed, only the body of the car was made to breathe.

Cut to how a building works for a bit. The body of the car can be compared to the building shell- the walls, the roof, the windows, etc. The windows of the car are akin to the openings on a building- windows, ventilators, clear storeys, etc. How the skin of the car works in affecting the internal thermal environment is comparable to that of the building shell.

If we consider how this shell works in keeping the car thermally comfortable, we find that in most instances it seems to fail, as in the example given above. The point that I am making is that the entire shell of the car (the insulation included) that was meant to manage the gain of heat (in hotter climates) and the subsequent loss of coolth (yes, it is a word in the HVAC industry)  from internal air-conditioning, was inadequate in doing so. I wonder (humour me for a bit), if we had designed cars with a secondary shade providing shell (forget the aerodynamics for a bit), perhaps with perforations (kind of like a jaali), which would perform like a self venting system of sorts, would we have reduced the insulation that the car would have ordinarily needed? Could such a cutting off of direct heat radiation also have lead to a reduced usage of air-conditioning?
Let us now apply the same logic to how a building is designed. Current practises take into consideration local climatic conditions and then design the building shell with materials (or composites) with the desired u-values to ensure an appropriate thermal flow balance. Like in the case of the car, this extra insulation of the building can be reduced by first starting with a modelling method that adopts aspects of shading and venting on a shell with conventional specs. In hotter climates (like most areas in the plains of India) where it is all about keeping the heat out, this would apply greatly.
A double shell  for instance could also be designed to provide extra strength.... a greater base level of air-exchanges would also ensure better internal air quality.... and eventually, a building so designed would end up spending less on air-conditioning costs.
Similarly, other thermal comfort influencers like humidity, can also be addressed by drawing on such parallels/inspiration. Ever wondered why when it is uncomfortably humid, and you are driving, you feel much better, by just rolling the windows down? The breeze helps remove the perspiration, and one starts feeling better. Now, in the building context, when it is humid, all one has to do, is to induce such an air movement. It is not necessary to jump straight to air-conditioning.
Many of us hasten to switch on the AC in the car and do so primarily because we cant stand the dust and pollution of our cities. A similar scenario of dust is played out in buildings, and somehow and air-conditioned environment is always seen as the universal solution. When all we needed was a dust screen! We know that plants perform that role and so do artificial louvres and 'jaalis'. Incorporating such measures would surely address dust control but don't you think that it could also add some vitality to otherwise banal façades?
So, what say we take one hard look at the experience of driving and how we deal with thermal comfort...again?