Technology and the Environment 3 Ritten Nearly 300 Years Ago, Swift’S Words Letting Remain a Telling Endorsement of the Impor- Tance of Technology
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The UNEP Magazine for Youth for young people · by young people · about young people Technology and Tunza the environment Conference Capturing Perennial dilemma carbon Greener cleaners Virgin Earth Small is Designing the controversial future TUNZA the UNEP Magazine for Youth. To view current and past issues of this publication online, please visit www.unep.org United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) CONTENTS PO Box 30552, Nairobi, Kenya Tel (254 20) 7621 234 Fax (254 20) 7623 927 Editorial 3 Telex 22068 UNEP KE E-mail [email protected] Letting in daylight 4 www.unep.org Technology can help 4 ISSN 1727-8902 Call of the wild 6 Director of Publication Eric Falt TUNZA answers your questions 8 Editor Geoffrey Lean Small is controversial 9 Special Contributor Wondwosen Asnake Guest Editors Karen Eng, Callum Douglas, Standing together 10 Julie Kavanagh Nairobi Coordinator Naomi Poulton Material values 11 Head, UNEP’s Children and Youth Unit Theodore Oben Capturing carbon 12 Circulation Manager Manyahleshal Kebede Taming the sun 12 Design Edward Cooper, Ecuador Virgin Earth 14 Production Banson Great ideas 15 Youth Contributors Preetam Alex, India; Jamal Alfalasi, United Arab Emirates; Nina Best, Greener cleaners 16 Brazil; Handy Acosta Cuellar, Cuba; Kate de Mattos-Shipley, United Kingdom; Morteza Biofuels 17 Farajian, Iran; Claire Hastings, Canada; Perennial dilemma 17 Molly Lowson, Canada; Norbert Machipisa, Zimbabwe; Caitlin MacLeod, Canada; Ahmed Designing the future 18 Abbas Mahmoud, Sudan; Tanya Mowbray, United Kingdom; Maimuna Sarr, Gambia; Green... so this year 19 Zhang Boju, China Earth works 20 Other Contributors Caroline Baillie; Jane Pressing issue 21 Bowbrick; Stefan Hain; Fred Pearce; Joachim Petzoldt; Peter Saunders; Carola-Victoria Seven ancient wonders 22 Wetzstein; Rosey Simonds and David Woollcombe, Peace Child International Printed in the United Kingdom The contents of this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of UNEP or the editors, nor are they an official record. The designations employed and the presentation do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNEP concerning the legal status of any country, territory or city or its authority, UNEP and Bayer, the German-based countries around the world and or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. international enterprise involved in develop new youth programmes. health care, crop science and Projects include: TUNZA Magazine, materials science, are working the International Children’s Painting together to strengthen young Competition on the Environment, UNEP promotes people’s environmental awareness the Bayer Young Environmental environmentally sound practices and engage children and youth in Envoy in Partnership with UNEP, the globally and in its own activities. This environmental issues worldwide. UNEP Tunza International Youth/ magazine is printed on 100% recycled paper, Children’s Conference, youth using vegetable-based inks and other eco- The partnership agreement, renewed environmental networks in Asia friendly practices. Our distribution policy aims to to run through 2010, lays down a Pacific, Africa and Latin America, reduce UNEP’s carbon footprint. basis for UNEP and Bayer to enlarge the Asia-Pacific Eco-Minds forum their longstanding collaboration to and a photo competition, ‘Ecology bring successful initiatives to in Focus’, in Eastern Europe. 2 TUNZA Vol 5 No 3 Cool & Cooler COOL: Wildlife-watching: birds, bears, dolphins, butterflies… COOLER: Getting involved in wildlife surveys. Contact your local council, or national or regional environmental organization, find out what surveys are taking place in your area, and volunteer to help. COOL: Energy-saving escalators. Escalators and moving sidewalks are handy. But con- tinuously running motors consume enormous amounts of energy. Automatic stop/start esca- EDITORIAL lators stop moving when they sense no one is using them, and turn on only when approaching riders walk though a barrier linked to a power echnology is one of the things that separates humans switch. Some escalators and people movers are from animals, and it has increasingly shaped our configured to use less energy by moving slowly Tworld. From earliest times, people have applied their when carrying a lighter load, and speeding up knowledge to making tools and machines that serve their when more people step on. purposes – from the wheel to the computer. Some now laud COOLER: Taking the stairs – while helping that technology as the foundation of all prosperity, and believe little old lady with her bags. that few constraints should be put on its development. Others condemn it as the cause of massive environmental damage, and call for strict controls. But the truth is that it is COOL: Clothes made of hemp. both and neither. Technology has both helped bring wealth COOLER: Surgical gowns made of bamboo. to much of the world, and been the instrument of much Bamboo contains a substance that kills of the harm done to the planet and its life. But in itself it bacteria, so researchers in Coimbatore, India, is neutral; its effects, for good or ill, are down to what we have used its fibre to make a highly absorbent make of it. garment that reduces the risk of infection during surgery. As our scientific knowledge, and our ways of putting it to practical use, rapidly increase, we need to ask two questions. Technology for what? And technology for whom? COOL: Recycled rubber tyre swings. Eco- Everything depends on the answers. It should be used for nostalgia: be a kid again, spinning under a tree. development, not destruction, it should benefit humanity as COOLER: Recycled rubber tyre sandbags. a whole rather than just the already wealthy few and, rather Sandbags used to control erosion often than be used to promote economic growth at all costs, it disintegrate. Recycled tyres are now providing must continue to be underpinned by the vital services a sturdier substitute, and using them – instead provided by a healthy planet. of dumping them – takes pressure off landfills. Eco-Blocks made from tyres can be interlocked, One key is to ensure that technology is appropriate: stacked, and glued or staked into place, and can empowering to the people that use it, suited to the places be reused for up to 10 years. where it is applied, and – above all – designed to promote COOLEST: Recycled rubber tyre houses. the sustainable development that eliminates poverty while Earthships, the brainchild of Michael Reynolds safeguarding the Earth and its natural systems. Another is of New Mexico's Solar Survival Architecture, are to ensure that it is widely shared, so that as many people houses made of stacks of recycled tyres ram- as possible benefit from it. There are many cases where med with dirt, packed with mud and plastered technology has fulfilled both these goals; more often, with adobe or stucco. The company teaches however, it is not even intended to do so. Our generation people how to construct them, and offers must redress the balance and concentrate resources and demonstrations to officials in disaster-relief effort on developing technologies suited to our age, and to areas like Mexicali, Mexico, and La Paz, Bolivia. our fragile, interdependent world. Technology and the environment 3 ritten nearly 300 years ago, Swift’s words Letting remain a telling endorsement of the impor- tance of technology. And the scientists that developed the seeds that made possible the in famous Green Revolution of the late 1960s Wand early 1970s fully deserved the accolade. Wheat and corn bred at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement daylight Centre, in Mexico, and rice developed at the International Rice Research Institute of the Philippines were two or three times more productive than traditional varieties. Harvests here’s nothing like daylight – as soared. India, long a byword for famine, quickly reached the those that are unfortunate enough brink of self-sufficiency in cereals and was able to provide Tto work at desks away from win- massive food aid to the newly independent Bangladesh; for a dows know too well. Overexposure to while she came second only to the United States as a donor. bright electric lights causes stress, Mexico, the other country to pioneer the new crops, exported whereas natural light can aid in a tenth of her harvest for five years. relaxation. Producing electricity for lighting usually involves burning fossil And yet malnutrition initially remained widespread in both fuels and emitting the carbon dioxide countries, and a United Nations report concluded that the that causes global warming, but daylight miracle crops had done little to increase the amount of food is non-polluting and free. their people ate because so many remained too poor to buy enough. In some ways the Green Revolution made the Now a simple new technology, tubular poverty worse. Small subsistence farmers could not afford skylights or solar pipes (as used at the to buy the expensive new seeds, or the fertilizers they clothes shop pictured right), brings needed to make them so productive, and ended up being natural light to interiors far from pushed off their land in favour of richer farmers able to windows. It redirects sunlight through a make use of the new technology. Modern machinery was clear plastic or glass dome fixed on a brought in to cultivate the bigger fields, which meant that roof and sends it down a metal tube to the newly landless poor could not even get work as farm the ceiling of the room to be lit. There, labourers. The variety of crops grown diminished as the concentrated light hits a lens or mir- monocultures took hold, and biodiversity suffered as ror that diffuses it, spreading out the traditional agricultural methods that were friendlier to daylight. wildlife disappeared. Aconccio Studio Aconccio The tube was a big hit in Australia where Lessons were eventually learned and care was taken to it was first commercially produced in integrate the new crops into existing agricultural systems.