Today in class we discussed the utility companies and how until they change how they operate our environment remains in danger. A utility is a service; now instead of the utility companies providing a good, i.e. electricity, imagine instead they provided a service, i.e lighting?

But what is the difference between providing a good or a service?

Let’s start with providing a good, the traditional way of providing a utility. The good in Vanderburg’s example today was electricity. Since the utility company is providing you with a good,

It’s goal is to maximize profit and to do that it must sell you the most electricity possible.

Which in turn completely dismisses the environment, since currently we do not have mass clean energy plants.

If instead the utility company provided you a service such as lighting than the environment becomes a factor by default. Think of it this way, if the utility company is trying to maximize profit by selling you a lighting service than it is in their best interest to provide the most efficient lighting possible; the environment benefits.

The same can be said for other utilities.

It is time for us as consumers to speak up. These utility companies currently have a monopoly and are making massive economic profits (just look at ExxonMobil’s latest profits). If we can collectively get the utilities to provide us with a service, instead of a good, than all of society will benefit; produces still make a profit, consumers get a product at a reasonable price, and we are seeking to preserve the environment.

This all ties into what my Technology, Society and the Enviorment professor, Dr. Vanderburg, teaches each week …

… we are all specialists in one area but we cannot solve the problems to the consequence of our solutions. However, if you take a team of experts one can find the solution to the problem that employs the least harm on our environment.

In essence Vanderburg is talking about the triple bottom line; people, planet profit (do what is right for society, protect the environment and still make some revenue). VE seeks to do the same thing, to see the big picture, to find the optimal solution but takes into consideration the impact on society and the environment. And instead of seeking to maximize profit VE seeks to maximize the total opportunity cost of our society, its environment and revenue.

I’m on board for VE. Used at the right time in the design process, at the preliminary phase, the great ideas that result from the VE process can be championed throughout the design process.

Vanderburg continued with the culture-based connectedness this week. He spoke about science, and coming from an engineer, it was interesting that science was not necessarily the absolute truth either. He did not say whether he believed religion, politics, economics, or culture was the answer but it was interesting that he inferred that all of these played a role in what our ‘ultimate’ truth was.

Our main focus in the lecture was Myths. Not a myth in the traditional, storytelling sense but as defined by Vanderburg “the interpolations and extrapolations that give us confidence to do anything.” The best definition I’ve found on-line comes from Princeton Universities Wordnet, which defines a myth as “a traditional story accepted as history; serves to explain the world view of a people.”

Pre-Industrial Revolution the Sacred or Central Myth of a society was cultural unity and hierarchy. Life was about Kings, Queens, Nobles and Peasants. They all believed in religion, learned from their ancestors and followed in their footsteps. We symbolize all that is known and anything that is unknown we try to symbolize as known (Vanderburg’s example was a tree. We know that a tree will not jump out in front of the car while driving. Why? Well we know what a tree does, i.e we can symbolize what it can do. But we also symbolize what it cannot do, not because we know what it cannot do, but because we know what it can do).

But what happened when the world industrialized?

The goal was to come full circle this lecture. To see that the technology-based connectedness now dominated the culture-based connectedness. During the Industrial Revolution the central or sacred myth was capital (money). Without capital we would not want machines to make goods quicker, but with capital there was a desire for increased profit.

Supporting this sacred myth of capital was the dominant myth of progress. Again to become a better society, a wealthier society, we had to move forward, be more efficient, and simplify labour further. This was further supported by the three great myths:

1. Material Progress would lead to social progress: We would all be better citizens if we individually had more capital
2. Hardwork: During the Industrial Revolution there was a movement away from the belief that God made you virtuous. Now individuals began to believe that working hard would make you virtuous.
3. Happiness: To be happy in life one had to have material comforts.

Again all of this was only possible with an influx of money.

Vanderburg concluded the lecture that when capital became the sacred myth that it had weakend the culture-based connectedness. However, even though the culture-based connectedness was weakened, cultural unity had strengthened.

Vanderburg today regressed and went from modern society and talked about life pre-industrial revolution. We learned everything, language, beliefs, politics, economics, culture from our ancestors; what he calls the culture-based connectiveness.

We went all the way back and thought of society in terms of babies. We were asked to think about how they learn. And as most people know, babies are like little sponges. They absorb everything in their surroundings. He described learning through the five senses (sight, smell, sound, taste and touch) and gave us many examples using sight (and as he said how ironic considering Vanderburg is blind). He did say that we learn by focusing. When we are born we can only see blurry images but we see these blurrs that bring us food, give us hugs, keep us clean, etc and we want to focus on seeing them. Therefore we learn to focus our vision to see that individual and as we progress we learn to see different emotions and by focusing, again, we learn to understand them.

As we grow up we learn to focus and to understand, however, as we are learning we are always relating everything new to everything we already understand. Because this is an engineering course he did relate it to a line of best fit or trend line. This relation of everything to everything else is what he calls the metaconscienceness; we have memories that we have access to and they help us to interpret what we are seeing by we cannot draw directly on these memories.

We did not really get into how this relates to technology-based connectiveness, that’s for next week. I can only imagine how are brain-mind map (or the culture-based connectivess) works in conjunction with the technology-based connectivess.

Did we influence technology or did technology influence us?

Vanderburg cited that it was cyclical and he used the example of the the textile industry to illustrate how we how both technology influences society and how we as a society influence technology.

It starts with Adam Smith’s technical devision of labour, which I mentioned last week here. Simply put the techical devision of labour is simplifying every little task in a production line into one job, think of it like an automobile makers construction line. To get back to the textile industry, Vanderburg stated that when society developed the first machine, let’s say it was a spinner, this created bottlenecks in the system. Why? Well now you couldn’t get enough wool from the sheep and after spinning there weren’t enough people with hand-looms to spin this into basic fabric.

First we have society influencing technology; we designed a machine to spin the wool faster. Next technology influences society; individuals can acheive higher profits if they can output more textiles, but in order to do that they need mechanized looms. As the mechanized loom goes into production a bottleneck is suffered in the stitching of fabrics. Etc, etc, etc, until every step becomes mechanized.

He concluded with a bunch of questions. How did this affect us in terms of our culture? How can we produce goods without being so harsh to the environment? Can we get people to think of the triple bottom line; economics, environment and society? (Afterall over 50% of physical and mental disease is attributed to the work place)

But how did this influence the first day of the conference?

Interestingly enough the first session I attended, Transportation Sustainability: From Policy to Reality, echoed Vanderburg’s course theme; we are all specialists in one area of expertise, but with every decision we make there are consequences outside our specialty. The only way that we can solve these problems effectively is to involve other experts that specialize in our area of consequence …

it is easier to solve a problem as a team than as an individual.

The 5 speakers, Pierre Marin (Transport Canada), Bruce McCuaig (Ministry of Transportation of Ontario), Gerry Welsh (City of Toronto), Jay Romator (Alberta Transportation) and John Hubbell (City of Calgary), all agreed that to solve the transit problems that one needed to involve various ministries. For instance the Light Rail System (LRT) that may be used in Calgary. You have to involve team members who speicialize in pedestrian, bike, car, and transit. Then your team expands even further to include the necessary architects and engineers to design this all. And finally get the public involved to see what ideas they have. And although this process is lengthy, in the end it saves both time and money because it has involved the interests of all parties involved; subsequent modifications to the plan are not usually needed.

As the session closed I went for a run to process everything from the day. It certainly was positive and set a great tone for the remaining two days.

Dr. Vanderburg promptly arrived in class this week and got right into the thick of things. Our class size was about half of last week, but it is a keen group of individuals interested in being part of the sustainable discussion.

His lecture was based on chapter 1 of his book, Living in the Labyrinth of Technology. The focus of the lecture was Connectiveness, from Biology-based to Technology-based over to Culture-based connectiveness. We didn’t really dive into biology-based connectiveness but focused in on the other two.

Technology vs Culture

What does this connectiveness mean?

Let’s start with Technology. All of technology requires a through-put of energy. This in turn requires both direct and indirect inputs. Eventually as you trace the production of a good or service it will cross the biosphere-society boundary and connect us back to our natural environment.  Culture-based connectiveness ties us together through symbolization; the human brain relates everything to everything else.

Prior to the industrial world we were a culture-based society. We learned what our ancestors learned and followed in their footsteps. We followed their religion, their language their belief.

And then Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and everything changed. Agreed I have over-simplified things here a lot but the notion of the technical division of labour changed everything,

We went from a culture-based society to a technology-based society.

We became a society craving higher income and more consumer goods to purchase with our new wealth. Skills became mechanized and simple and people started designing machines to do human jobs. Our society went from depending on what our ancestors had known to challenging the limits of science.

With this desire for new technology came the degradation to our environment. It was around 200 years ago that we began to ‘industrialize’ around that same time, Vanderburg explained, the world average temperature began to rise.