Starting over: Rebuilding Civilisation from Scratch
The way we live is mostly down to accidents of history. So what if we thought it through properly
In just a few thousand years, we humans have created a remarkable civilisation: cities, transport networks, governments, vast economies full of specialised labour and a host of cultural labels. It all just about works, but it’s hardly a model of rational design--instead, people in each generation have done the best they could with what they inherited from their predecessors. As a result, we’ve ended up trapped in what, in review, look like mistakes. What sensible engineer, for example,would build a sprawling, low-density megalopolis (巨大城市) like Los Angeles on purpose
Suppose we could try again. Imagine that Civilisation 1.0 evaporated tomorrow, leaving us with unlimited manpower, a willing populace and--most important--all the knowledge we’ve accumulated about what works, what doesn’t, and how we might avoid the errors we got locked into last time. If you had the chance to build Civilisation 2.0 from scratch, what would you do differently
Take cities, for starters. Historically, they have generally arisen near resources that were important at the time-say harbours, farmland or minerals--and then grown higgledy-piggledy (杂乱无章的). How would we design cities without the constraints of historical development
In many ways, the bigger cities are, the better. City dwellers have, on average, a smaller environmental footprint than those who live in smaller towns or rural areas. Indeed, when Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and his colleagues compared cities of different sizes, they found that doubling the size of a city leads to a 15 per cent decrease in the energy use per capita, the amount of roadway per capita, and other measures of resource use. For each doubling in size,city dwellers also benefit from a rise of around 15 per cent in income, wealth, the number of colleges,and other measures of socioeconomic well-being. Put simply,bigger cities do more with less.
Of course,there are limits to a city’s size. For one thing, West notes, his study leaves out a crucial part of the equation:happiness. As cities grow, the increasing buzz that leads to greater productivity also quickens the pace of life. Crime, disease, even the average walking speed, also increase by 15 per cent per doubling of city size. "That’s not good, I suspect, for the individual," he says. "Keeping up on that treadmill (跑步机), going faster and faster, may not reflect a better quality of life."
City living
Today,online social networking gives individual users tools to coordinate and cooperate like never before. "I would build the cities in an open-source way, where everybody can actually participate to decide how it’s used and how it changes," says Carlo Ratti, an designer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "It’s a similar process to what happens in Wikipedia." By tapping into this sort of crowd-sourcing, the residents themselves could help plan their own wiki-neighbourhood, Ratti proposes. An entrepreneur seeking to start a sandwich shop, for example, could consult residents to find out where it is most needed. Likewise, developers and residents could collaborate in deciding the size, placement and amenities for a new housing block--even, perhaps, the placement of roads and walking paths.
Referring to the problem of energy, virtually everyone agrees the answer should be renewables. "We can’t say it should all be solar or it should all be wind. It’s really critical that we have all of them," says Lena Hansen, an electric system yst with the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy-efficiency think tank in Boulder,Colorado. That would help ensure a dependable supply. And instead of massive power plants, the best route would be small dispersed systems like rooftop solar panels. This decentralised generation system would be less vulnerable to extreme s like storms or attacks.
While we’re messing around with the economy, we might want to move away from using GDP as a measure of success. When nations began focusing on GDP after the second world war, it made sense to measure an economy by its production of goods and services. "At that time, what most people needed was stuff. They needed more food, better building structures--stuff that was lacking--to make them happy," says Ida Kubiszewski of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University in Oregon. "Now times have changed. That’s no longer the limiting factor to happiness."
Instead, we may want to broaden our indicator to include environmental quality, leisure time, and human happiness-- a trend a few governments are already considering. With Gross Domestic Happiness as our guide, people might be more likely to use gains in productivity to reduce their work hours rather than increase their salaries. That may sound utopian, but at least some societies routinely put greater value on happiness than on material things--such as the kingdom of Bhutan and the aboriginal potlatch (冬季赠礼节) cultures of the west coast of North America that redistribute their property. "I don’t think it’s contrary to human nature to have a system like this," says Robert Costanza, an ecological economist also at Portland State.
New world view
On the other hand, increases in mobility, communication and technology--as well as the sheer size of the human population--mean that many of the world’s problems are now truly global. Just as s drove medieval city states to integrate into nations centuries ago, global problems are now pressing for global solutions, he says. And that requires some form of global governance, at least to set broad g0als--biodiversity standards, say, or global emissions caps--toward which local governments can find their own solutions.
All our design efforts to this point have been aimed at creating a sustainable, equitable and workable new civilisation. But if we want our new society to last through the ages,many sustainability researchers stress one more point: be careful not to make it too efficient.
In the end, though, no human civilisation can last forever. Every society encounters problems and solves them in whatever way seems most helpful, and every time it does so, it raises its complexity--and its vulnerability." You can never fully anticipate the consequences of what you do," notes Tainter. Every civilisation sows the seeds of its own ual doom--and no matter how carefully we plan our new built-from-scratch civilisation, the most we can hope for is to delay the inevitable.
Starting over: Rebuilding Civilisation from ScratchIn creating a sustainable,equitable and workable civilization,we also need to be careful not to______.