ICIS Resources: ICIS Newsletter: June 2005

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Editorial

Dear Friend,

Since we last wrote, the ICIS secretariat has been busy developing partnerships that will help us to reach our goal of becoming sustainable in an environmental, social, ethical as well as financial sense.

Until now, our work with sustainability has been very rewarding . . . but more on a personal and not financial level. However, if we cannot also be financially sustainable, the principles which underpin our work simply do not work . . . many good sustainability initiatives can and do fail without fiscal sustainability

With this in mind, the past few months have been spent developing new partnerships and projects as well as seeking funding from various sources. The idea is that by working together with other organisations, we can resources including knowledge, to work towards shared goals and share the benefits of fruitful cooperation. These partnerships are in the pipeline and we hope that our joint efforts will pay off this year.

As an aside, if you know of any company or source who you think might want to support us financially, either through reciprocal initiatives, partnerships, sponsoring etc, please let us know.

In addition, we have been busy running our modules, continuing our ecodesign research and hosting a lecture series on sustainable architecture and engineering. Read more below in the ICIS update.

WANTED: a more enlightened Denmark

Freedom of expression is seen as a basic human right in most Western countries. Our countries and societies were previously ruled by political dictators and systems, where the ordinary woman and man – or a minority group, were not allowed to speak out against the system. They had no voice. As our societies developed so did the need for the human right to express yourself. Today we take freedom of speech and expression for granted. Anyone can express his or her ideas freely.

However, freedom of speech was not made lawful so that anyone who felt like it could undermine others’ religion, culture or traditions. It was given so that the individual and the minority were able to speak up against oppression.

However, I believe that the publication of the Mohammed cartoons last year has nothing to do with freedom of expression. It was an arrogant put-down to Muslims; an unnecessary provocation in an increasingly unpleasant race and culture-related debate ongoing in Danish politics.

Being a Dane, I can only apologize for those of my people for whom freedom of speech became a tool with which to undermine our neighbours. I deeply regret that Denmark has become this primitive in its behaviour towards its inhabitants and global neighbours. I regret that we have lost faith in who we are (or rather, were) and failed the most valued and essential principles in our society, which we all understood to be the development, nurturing and maintenance of a society of equality, a society with room for everyone regardless of religion, colour and background. It was a society where development did not mean hard-line politics with suppression of ethnic minorities but a society based on balanced human and humane principles.

Many Danes have always fought for minority rights and freedom for the oppressed. I believe that at one time, it was part of 'being Danish'. We were not a country with great economic or political power, but we did well in humanistic and societal terms.

For ICIS, Denmark was a country moving towards sustainable development in environmental, social, ethical as well as economic terms. As such, it was deemed a relatively advanced society and a role model for many countries around the world. All this seem to have changed over the past few years, and we seem to have turned 180 degrees and started to move backwards.

However, my hope for Denmark is that something good will come from the recent events and debate. To move forward, one sometimes has to take some steps back. Perhaps we needed to regain some humility and rediscover our the true meaning of democracy and tolerance?

From much of the Danish media and from all the letters written, protesting against the cartoons, the true underlying spirit of what it means to be Danish is changing. More and more protests are witnessed through the media, by writers, by artists, by ambassadors, by politicians, by the women and men on the streets.

Many programmes are now broadcast on radio and TV, debating the Muslim and Christian faiths, their culture and traditions - and the potential for new collaboration, which never would have seen the light of day, had it not been for the recent events.

The last time Denmark was in real crisis, after the Napoleonic wars, our society changed dramatically for the better. It is now time for Danish citizens to reflect and decide on who we are and who we want to be. Perhaps we may can regain the progressive image we had before – after a period of reflection and with some hard work and clear focus. It will require a change of attitude and direction

Karen Blincoe
Director, ICIS

Environmental and Health

Feeling tired? Can’t concentrate? Having difficulty losing weight? We have come across a number of articles recently suggesting that this may not be caused by your own personal inertia, but rather a factor of your thyroid health and what an increasing number of experts believe is an undiagnosed ‘epidemic’ of hypothyroidism. Testing for hypothyroidism currently only picks out the more acute or obvious cases and some doctors estimate that as much as 15-40% of the US population suffers from sub-optimal thyroid function. Occurrence of clinical hypothyroidism is estimated as being ten times more common in women than men.

Your thyroid is responsible for your metabolism and is therefore key to your digestive, mental and in fact, overall health. It is believed that thyroid malfunction, both overactive and under-active, is generally due to autoimmune response by the body. This is where the body's immune system produces antibodies which attack the gland because the tissues seem foreign to the body: this upsets normal hormone production. It is also thought that environmental factors play a part and that a build-up of dangerous toxins, chlorinated substances, viruses, pathogens, infections, pesticides, altered enzymes or hormones in the tissues of the thyroid gland can cause its malfunction. Like many of the issues at the interface between environment and health, hypothyroidism and its causes is characterised by complexity, some scientific uncertainty, and diffuse possible causes.

Symptoms may include:- low body temperature, insomnia, depression, dry skin/hair, fatigue, PMS, gain weight too easily, headaches/migraines, menstrual difficulties, brittle nails, poor short term memory and concentration, low motivation and ambition, hair loss (including outer third of the eyebrows), fluid retention, dizziness or lightheadedness, irritability, food intolerance, tendency towards substance abuse, drooping, swollen eyes, anxiety/panic attacks, skin problems/infections/acne, infertility, dry eyes, heat and cold intolerance, low blood pressure, elevated cholesterol irritable bowel, slow healing, pale skin, coarse or leathery skin, itchiness, mood swings, loss of appetite, slow speech, muscle cramps, stiff joints recurrent infections, food cravings, crying jags, reduced or excessive sweating, frequent colds or sore throats, poor co-ordination, constipation, low libido, asthma/allergies, acid indigestion.
With a list of this size, it’s hardly surprising that it remains an “undiagnosed” epidemic or a least difficult to diagnose; most of us could claim several of these symptoms each month . . .

Determining low thyroid can be done by a simple body temperature assessment on resting basal body temperature. Blood and other tests can be undertaken by your doctor and thyroid medication prescribed.

Alternative therapies for treating sub-clinical hypothyroidism include consumption of virgin coconut oil and olive oil, while avoiding soybean oils and soy products. The consumption of iodine-rich foods such as seaweed, cranberries, fish and eggs is also suggested as well as increased intake of vitamin A and the minerals zinc, selenium, manganese and chromium. Goitrogens are foods that can block iodine from being absorbed by the thyroid and include turnips, cabbage, mustard, pinenuts, millet, peanuts and soybeans, which should be avoided.

In a (yet another) crushing commentary published in the Guardian last year, environmentalist and political activist, George Monbiot highlights that fact that although biofuel is being promoted as an important substitute to fossil, a market is being created for ‘the most destructive crop on earth’.

Not only does biodiesel set up competition for land-use, thus compromising arable land, but the biodiesel industry as ‘accidentally invented the world’s most carbon-intensive fuel.”

Plans for the development of new biodiesel plants are being announced from competing interests more and more frequently, most of which will be making diesel from oil from palm trees, because biodiesel production is cheaper than another crop.

In September 2005, Friends of the Earth published a report about the impact of palm oil production. "Between 1985 and 2000," it found, "the development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia". In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of forest have been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares are scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5 million in Indonesia.

This kind of development could lead to the extinction of many species of rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and other species, as well as the eviction of indigenous people.

As Monbiot explains, “before oil palms, which are small and scrubby, are planted, vast forest trees, containing a much greater store of carbon, must be felled and burnt. Having used up the drier lands, the plantations are moving into the swamp forests, which grow on peat. When they've cut the trees, the planters drain the ground. As the peat dries it oxidises, releasing even more carbon dioxide than the trees. In terms of its impact on both the local and global environments, palm biodiesel is more destructive than crude oil from Nigeria.”

The problem stems from EU targets set to ensure an increasing percentage of transport fuel comes from plants by the year 2010. At the same time a national ban on environmentally destructive fuels would infringe on world trade rules. The answer is not in seeing biodiesel as a substitute and thus seeking to accommodate current and predicted demand, however high it rises.

As Monbiot says, “There is simply no substitute for cutting back. . . . Trying to meet a rising demand for fuel is madness, wherever the fuel might come from.”

In addition, a University College London report commissioned by the UK government states that environmentally friendly vehicles using hydrogen-based fuels and hybrid power sources will not have much impact in preventing dangerous and irreversible pollution within 15 years.

The study found that even if green vehicles become commonplace, Britain’s demand for travel will cancel out benefits and critically pollute the air. It advocates radical measures to change behaviour including lower speed limits, road charging, investment in cycling and a policy of higher prices and “rations” for carbon emissions, as well as an examination of the concept of carbon emission ‘rations’ which cannot be exceeded without buying someone else’s shares. The report also recommends car clubs and travel ‘blending’ whereby people are encouraged to combine several trips for different purposes; sounds like common sense to us!

ICIS VIEW: George Monbiot has been called a ‘hysterical leftist’ but his column and website often brings a thought-provoking perspective on environmental issues. It seems clear that changing behaviour and reducing consumption, as well as clean fuels and technology are all necessary in order to achieve sustainability.

Geopolitics

The most potent threats to life on earth - global warming, health pandemics, poverty and armed conflict - could be ended by moves that would unlock $7 trillion - $7,000,000,000,000 (£3.9trn) - of previously untapped wealth, the United Nations claimed recently.

The price? An admission that the nation-state is an old-fashioned concept that has no role to play in a modern globalised world where financial markets have to be harnessed rather than simply condemned.

In a ground-breaking move, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) has drawn up a visionary proposal that has been endorsed by a range of figures including Gorden Brown, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer and Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Laureate. The proposal, unveiled at a gathering of world business leaders, the World Economic Forum at Davos, pushes countries to co-operate to slice through the ‘Gordian knot of problems’ that the world has faced for most of the past century. By doing so, it forces countries to face up to the fact that their public finance and growth figures conceal the vast damage their economies do to the environment.

Although very ambitious, the proposal is unlikely to get support from environmental groups who believe that action to curb consumption, rather than market incentives, are the way to reduce carbon emissions.

Design and Architecture

AbioGenesis and Play design Ltd are two design consultancies working together to provide the service “leftovers”; creating new products and a brand from the materials leftover from other manufacturing processes, in a kind of cradle-to-cradle concept.

Abiogenesis formed in 2003 comprising six recently graduated designers from the UK’s design college, Central Saint Martins. One striking example of their work is a cutlery range made out of leftover pipes from an automobile factory, reasonably priced at around £30 a set.

Getting people involved in saving the planet isn't easy. Why should we bother, if America is pumping out all that carbon as if there was no tomorrow?

However, one neat solution - highlighted in the March issue of the architects' magazine Blueprint - offers householders the chance to save energy and money. Three graduates of the Royal College of Art, Jon Sawdon Smith, Greta Corke and Richard Woods, have formed their own company, DIY Kyoto, whose first device reveals how much electricity a household is using at any time. Instead of an old electric meter racking up units in an outside cupboard, their Wattson (as in What Watts are On) will tell you - in big red lights - how much power you are consuming. Then you can turn off heaters or lights that are burning in empty rooms.

The device is expected to cost around £150 and should be easy to install and use, says DIY Kyoto. 'It's about empowering people to act by making dull but critical information relevant,' said Woods. 'While the average householder sleeps, his home works its way through £100 of electricity a year. People just don't think about the microwave left plugged in, the mobile phone chargers, the cable television boxes or the computers.'

Ethical Consumption

Another year, another Valentine’s Day and yet another opportunity for restaurants, card and chocolate companies to cash in on our anxieties and sheep-like tendencies to consume.

Okay, that may be the cynical view, but its true that hundreds of thousands of people will have bought their significant others cut-flowers on February 14th to illustrate their love. Even here in expensive Denmark, these bouquets will have been one of the cheapest ways to show your affection, but the question is, how ‘rosy’ is the cut flower industry itself?

Not very, seems to be the growing consensus from concerned NGOs and environment agencies around the globe. The highly lucrative trade, dominated by the flower-growing nations of the Netherlands, Colombia, Kenya and Israel has seen a rise in problems as the growing processes become more industrialised. These include poor worker rights, pesticide exposure and water-source pollution, linked in particular to flower farms around Lake Naivasha in Kenya. Some flower plantations operate like sweatshops, with issues such as irregular paychecks, forced overtime and sexual harrassment on the list of abuse. The flowers themselves are grown in enclosed greenhouses, where the pesticides are unable to disperse in the air, leading to intoxication.Trade laws actually encourage the use of these toxic pesticides, as most national regulations require that flowers arrive at the ‘border’ pest-free.

In addition to the working and environmental conditions, the industry relies on airfreighting to deliver the blooms as fresh as possible, within a few days of being cut. This, together with constant refrigeration and the need for water means that the environmental footprint of a typical bouquet can be enormous and the ‘transit of each flower creates far more than its own weight in CO2 pollution”. (Guardian Unlimited Tuesday 14^th Feb).

All this should mean that those roses don’t smell so sweet, at least to those with an ethical conscience. So what are the sustainable choices? Seasonal, preferably organic flowers, if possible, otherwise bulb flowers or pot-plants that, as they are usually not shipped too far and last longer too.

Using statistics and psychological tests, researchers are nailing down what clerics and philosophers have preached for millennia: Materialism is bad for the soul. Only, in the new formulation, materialism is bad for your emotional well-being.

In recent years, researchers have reported an ever-growing list of downsides to getting and spending - damage to relationships and self-esteem, a heightened risk of depression and anxiety, less time for what the research indicates truly makes people happy, like family, friendship and engaging work. And maybe even headaches.

"Consumer culture is continually bombarding us with the message that materialism will make us happy," said Tim Kasser, a psychology professor at Knox College in Illinois who has led some of the recent work. "What this research shows is that that's not true."

The research is more nuanced than that, of course. For people who are living paycheck to paycheck, more money unquestionably brings greater well-being. And for the comfortable, a raise or a new purchase can certainly feel good - for a little while, anyway. Also, economic research indicates that a hunger for money can motivate people to perform better and even more creatively.

There is also a question of cause and effect. Feelings of insecurity incline people toward materialist values, the research suggests, and that insecurity can also lead to relationship troubles and other problems associated with a materialistic lifestyle.

But Kasser argues that when people turn to material things to feel better, they compound the problem, because they seek experiences that "don't do a very good job of meeting their psychological needs."

Ed Diener, a University of Illinois psychology professor and happiness expert, said in an e-mail that he has found that "those who value material success more than they value happiness are likely to experience almost as many negative moods as positive moods, whereas those who value happiness over material success are likely to experience considerably more pleasant moods and emotions than unpleasant moods and emotions."

Studies show that poor people who emphasize materialistic goals are especially likely to be unhappy, while in some studies, materialistic rich people show fewer ill effects, presumably because they are meeting more of their goals. But even for the better-off, materialism can create a nagging appetite that can never be satisfied.

Materialism becomes "a more difficult goal than many," Diener said, "because it is open-ended and goes on forever - we can always want more, which is usually not true of other goals such as friendship. With friends, we have them and enjoy them but usually are not taught that we keep needing more."

There's also an opportunity cost to chasing the wrong goals, said Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard psychology professor who focuses on people's flawed ability to predict their emotional reactions. When people spend their effort pursuing material goods in the belief that they will bring happiness, he said, they're ignoring other, more effective routes to happiness.

So why is materialism so common? The trouble is that the error is subtle.

"If it were the case that money made us totally miserable, we'd figure out we were wrong" to pursue it, Gilbert said. But "it's wrong in a more nuanced way. We think money will bring lots of happiness for a long time, and actually it brings a little happiness for a short time."

Whether warnings from social scientists will make a dent in popular consuming values remains to be seen. Kasser compared the expanding pool of data on the potential harm of materialism to the data on lung cancer caused by smoking. Preachers had long called smoking "the devil's work," he said, but it was only when the cancer connection was proved scientifically that smoking really began to wane.

Gilbert of Harvard, however, is skeptical. "Let's try. Let's give them the data. Let's shout it from the mountaintops," he said. "But let's not be too surprised when all the people in the valley nod their heads knowingly and then go on to covet a Porsche and a new home and tickets to the Super Bowl."

ICIS Update

The ICIS Designer Development programme is an EU Social Fund-financed programme for designers in the municipality of Frederiksborg, in Northern Zealand, Denmark. The programme aims to elevate the leadership competence of designers during a series of week-long residential modules with high-profile tutors from around the global. The February module saw personal development guru, Nicholas Janni working with this year’s batch of designers and creative professionals on peak performance and getting into the “zone”, the area of peak performance where excellence is achieved in all fields and activities. Nicolas is a former theatre director and a teacher of peak performance to actors at renowned theatre schools such as RADA, GSA and Mountview. His work at Olivier Mythodrama in the UK draws on and unites the fields of personal, artistic and professional development. In particular he works with all four aspects of the human being, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

The Sustainability Days’ seminars for architects, engineers and designers addressed the challenges posed by new regulations in the building industry which requires a significant reduction in energy use on an annual basis.

We invited Danish architects from practices such as Henning Larsens Tegnestue, CF Møller, PLOT and Arkitema as well as English engineers firms, Sedgewick Engineers and Arup Associates. The aim was to bring them together to discuss the implications of these new rules as well as the barriers to sustainable development in the building industry. Lennart Grut from Richard Rogers Partnership and Vibeke Grube Larsen from VGL, both ICIS board members, moderated the seminar days.

We have now finished Phase 1 of the ICIS/Lund Project: an EU Interreg-funded joint project with the Environmental Strategy Department of Sweden’s Lund University, Sweden. The overall aim of the project is to create an innovative Masters in Sustainable Design in Scandinavia.

The first phase involved a feasibility study, mapping out existing programmes in the EU and undertaking a survey of selected Swedish and Danish companies to assess industry’s need for trained sustainable designers. The results will be used in the second phase this spring, when the educational platform will developed and then tested in the autumn term as a pilot course.

Further information about the project, including related events is available on www.susdes.org

The ICIS Innovation, Sustainability and Leadership programme is set to commence in September 2006; a new part-time international design development programme focussing on sustainability as well as innovation and leadership competences.

We will be putting up more information and an application form online shortly. In the meantime, please contact contact Karen Blincoe, blincoe@iciscenter.org for more information.

ICIS has developed a new collaborative project, which aims to implement sustainability issues in main stream design education in the EU.

Our partners in this new initiative are Brighton University, the University of Poznan, SERI (Sustainable European Research Institute) and BEDA (Bureau of European Design Associations). We will know later this year, whether we have the funding ‘green-light’ to go ahead and further develop the project.

Inspiration

Are clouds merely formations of condensed water? Or are they actual expressions of the moods of the atmosphere? At the Cloud Appreciation Society, they take a more poetic and less meteorological view of clouds and believe that we should all stop moaning about them. Their manifesto is ‘against the charter of blue-sky thinking’ and states the following:

“WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry,
and the most egalitarian of her displays, since
everyone can have a fantastic view of them.”

The Cloud Appreciation Society’s website has been named as one of the internet’s most weird and wonderful by search engine Yahoo, after finding out that more at one point last year it was receiving more than 7 million hits a month.

Check out the amazing cloud gallery on www.cloudappreciationsociety.com; it may rejuvenate the wonder of your ‘innerchild’. As they say, why not live life with your head amongst the clouds!

Source:

The Times, January 27^th 2006
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2011699,00.html

ICIS NeWS

March 2006
APOLOGIES FOR MULTIPLE EMAIL POSTING

in this issue:

Editorial

Environment and Health

Geopolitics

Design and Architecture

Ethical Consumption

ICIS Update

Inspiration

Contact ICIS

Editorial

Environmental and Health

Geopolitics

Design and Architecture

DIY Kyoto

Ethical Consumption

ICIS Update

Inspiration

Contact ICIS

ICIS NeWS:
info@iciscenter.org

ICIS NeWS editors Karen Blincoe and Trudy Follwell

Sign up for short ICIS NeWS regularly (by e-mail)

ICIS NeWS

March 2006 ** APOLOGIES FOR MULTIPLE EMAIL POSTING**

in this issue:

Editorial

Environmental and Health

Geopolitics

Design and Architecture

DIY Kyoto

Ethical Consumption

ICIS Update

Inspiration

March 2006
APOLOGIES FOR MULTIPLE EMAIL POSTING