Necessity may be the mother of invention, but innovators need to address problems before they become absolute necessities.
Dickson Despommier:About a week and a half ago there was a wonderful event that took placein New York City called the World Science Festival and it was organizedby the universities inside the city of New York, and it had about 40venues and one of those venues was at NYU and I had the privilege ofparticipating in it, and the venue was called Future Cities. All right.How do I imagine a future city? If we can't learn how to make our livesas comfortable as possible, and recycle, and by recycling I don't meancollecting old tin cans and bottles, and crushing them up and sellingthem for profit. No, no. I mean behaving ecologically to the point ofconserving all of the passive transfer of energy that we have availablewith minimum use off the grid, and in fact add energy back to the gridand become a grid. Have cities become grids for energy generation. Wemanufacture, we use and we discard. That's got to change. Cradle tocradle, not cradle to grave. That's the deal, so I imagine that's howeverybody can get involved. Every citizen can think of a way in whichsomething that we do this way today is done differently tomorrow, and Iknow this day is coming because I feel it deep inside now. I have alittle saying on the side of my desk at work. I know this sounds corny,it's from a fortune cookie. It didn't say "For a good time call." Itdidn't say that. What it said was "Nothing is impossible to a willingheart." Now that sounds corny but to honest with you, if you don'tbelieve it that this is real and that that's actually going to changesomething, there's no way that you can get somebody involved. I havenever had a response to this program other than "My heart says this isa damn good idea. Let's take it further an intellectualize it, and seewhere it goes." That's how you get involved. You don't have to come upwith your own strategy for growing food inside the urban setting. Butit has to reuse the energy that you used to make it to begin with.That's all. That's the only requirement. After that you're on your own.
Recorded on: 6/10/08
