Embedded Files
Introduction To Industrial Ecology
Introduction To Industrial Ecology
Our Wingardium Leviosa spell
Our Wingardium Leviosa spell
For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings have been developing slowly, until something very special happened in the late 19th century: the Industrial Revolution. What happened then is that we discovered something pretty amazing but dangerous, and that thing is fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are made of oil, gas, and coal, which we can basically burn using a simple match, and get a lot of energy out of it. Thanks to this magic trick, human beings can use machines to do crazy things that they would never be able to do with their muscles. Think of it as an infinite use of the Wingardium Leviosa spell in Harry Potter: not only you can lift a feather with that spell, but you can also move 20-tons trucks, dig huge holes in the ground to extract a lot of different stuff, or even fly to the other side of the world in a few hours only.
Every single human being on this Planet is now using the equivalent of thousands of Wingardium Leviosa spells every day. In fact, as you are reading these lines, you are probably using a laptop, sitting in a comfortable house, where heating or cooling might be on, grabbing your food in the fridge running 24/7. And if you, at this very moment, can think about getting familiar with Industrial Ecology, it is most likely because you can live a comfortable life. All of this means that human primary needs are better satisfied in developed countries today than they were before the era of fossil fuels. That’s pretty cool, right?
But then, what’s the problem?
The “Sustainability” Problem
The “Sustainability” Problem
The thing with fossil fuels is that they are a finite resource. For a second, humans thought this could go on forever without having to think about it: infinite energy forever. But in the past decades, we started to realize that this heaven might only be a short-term situation. And this is where sustainability comes into play. Sustainability describes the ability to continue with our current way of living over a long period of time, while preserving such finite resources. So in the future we can keep using our Wingardium Leviosa spell. For human societies, sustainability means being able to satisfy your needs without compromising the ability of your children and grandchildren to also satisfy theirs. But how does that exactly prevent us from always digesting more and more fossil fuels?
Well, the answer is not simple. Fossil fuels and our modern consumption practices led to a wide range of problems, which we could summarize in three words: the triple planetary crisis. Human activities in the era of fossil fuels are threatening our planet Earth through climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss. First, when we burn fossil fuels to produce the energy we need we release a lot of carbon dioxide, which stays in the atmosphere for a long time, where it prevents solar radiation from leaving the Earth. In a nutshell, we are cooking like tomatoes in a very hot greenhouse (and spoiler, this is called the greenhouse effect!). Second, burning fossil fuels produces a lot of harmful things that we throw away in nature, which pollutes both our environment and human bodies. Third, this heating (remember the tomatoes?) induces climate change, deforestation, pollution and many other factors, causing a lot of species to disappear.
This triple planetary crisis is a direct consequence of our human activities, especially related to our reliance on fossil fuels. If that helps, think of it as our own Voldemort: no matter how much Wingardium Leviosa spells you shout at him, you’d better figure out a better way to kill the guy!
The Elder Wand of sustainability: Industrial Ecology
The Elder Wand of sustainability: Industrial Ecology
Human beings are causing this triple planetary crisis, so probably we should be the ones finding solutions to solve the crisis! You are in the right place now, because this is precisely what Industrial Ecologists are trying to do!
The Industrial Ecology field is born with the idea that our industrial way of producing could actually try to work a bit more like our ecosystems do: using materials wisely, building alliances, cherishing diversity, and many other things. In Industrial Ecology, we have methods that allow us to quantify the environmental impacts of human activities. These methods can be applied to any kind of stuff, from transportation, buildings, energy, phones, shoes, forest ecosystems, to your favorite cereals. So don’t be scared, if you like anything at all in this world, I’m sure you will find a way to use Industrial Ecology to assess the environmental impacts of that thing!
In other pages of the website, we explain what Industrial Ecology methods are, and we present some concrete examples of how these methods can be applied to think about our cities and economies with urban metabolism and circular economy concepts!
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse