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]]>“We are the ones who make the robots, with our own labour,” he says. “We make the criteria according to which they operate. And then we teach them to learn how to improve. The problem is not that robots are stealing our work, but that we continue to work more and more, and that the platforms are fragmenting and rendering invisible the labour that is necessary to make the algorithms work.”
Roberto Ciccarelli interviews Antonio Casilli on digital labour and platform capitalism while refuting the “end of work”. Originally published in SP’s The Bullet.
Roberto Ciccarelli: Antonio Casilli, a professor at Télécom ParisTech, is considered one of the leading experts in the capitalism of digital platforms. He is known for his pioneering research on “digital labour,” refuting the apocalyptic common-sense notion that is proclaiming the end of work as such because of automation.
Roberto Ciccarelli (RC): In Italy there has been a lot of discussion about the firing of two IKEA workers, Marica in Corsico and Claudio in Bari. They were fired because their lives could not fit into the algorithm that governs the workforce. Have we gone back to the 19th century?
Antonio Casilli (AC): The capitalism of digital platforms makes labour discipline more rigid, as it imposes seemingly “scientific” measurements and evaluations, which can resemble the old industrial manufacturing. The key difference is that the workers, in exchange for their submission to this discipline, are not getting the social safety and the political representation that they obtained before in exchange for their subordination. This new Taylorism has all the disadvantages and none of the old benefits. The workers are caught within a contradiction in terms: subordinate and precarious at the same time.
RC: After the Amazon strike in Piacenza, you advised the unions that they should also pay attention to data politics, not only to labour policy. What does that mean?
AC: In Piacenza, only the visible tip of the iceberg was seen. That was a strike in a physical location, for better working conditions in connection to tangible assets. There is a whole other part of Amazon that for years has been engaged in struggle. I am thinking of the micro-jobbers on Amazon Mechanical Turk, a system for the creation and training of artificial intelligence that is powered by micro-workers, people paid piecemeal, only a few cents, for data, image and text management tasks. These workers must organize themselves for better compensation and more humane working conditions. In this case, trade unions need to recover lost ground, because the “Turkers” perform tasks that are too small for them to take into account.
RC: Are the unions doing this?
AC: Yes, although there are several different initiatives at the moment working at the national scale. In Germany, the metalworkers of IgMetall have provided a platform for these workers’ claims: FairCrowdWork. In France, the CGT has created Syndicoop, which helps trade unionists to organize employees around a campaign. In Belgium, there is SMart: a cooperative, not a trade union, which works with freelance workers and also with home delivery workers (“riders”). A process is taking place in which the classical trade unions are seeking to “platformize” themselves, while the cooperatives develop services on a mutual basis for workers on the platforms.
RC: From the struggles of Italian “riders,” the demand emerged that they should be put on the same contract as logistics workers. Is it the same in France and in other countries?
AC: In the on-demand economy, the services based on real-time platforms and products are the focus of a major legal and political dispute regarding the contractualization of workers. Up to now, the goal has been to regularize their position in a common sector contract that would apply to the area covered by the platform. In the case of Uber, in America, Europe and South Korea labour struggles are converging toward calling for their recognition as urban transport workers. For Amazon, workers are seeking the application of the common contract for postal workers. The action plan still needs to be widened further.
RC: Widened how?
AC: By recognizing all the micro-work done by the “click workers,” even those paid a few cents per piece to accomplish tasks such as managing data, images or texts. Their work is useful for machine learning, for teaching a machine how to learn and creating artificial intelligence.
RC: And how can this be achieved?
AC: Everything is tied to the quantity of information produced, and to how and to what extent the platforms are taking advantage of this production of data. Uber takes between 20 and 40 per cent on each transaction that takes place on its platform, and is fully aware of the value that is being produced. Some of the wealth produced must be redistributed to the workers on the platforms. While this wouldn’t be a wage, such a redistribution would be more equitable than the existing situation.
RC: What are other examples of digital micro-work?
AC: There are many. It is a global market that counts at least 100 million workers. In China, India, the Philippines and Indonesia, platforms and services exist that are little known in Europe. These workers do a very wide range of jobs that allow Western digital economies to function. In these countries, you can find the Google search engine evaluators (raters). They are the workers who check whether the results of a search are appropriate and correct the range of results by adjusting the algorithm. There are also the content moderators on Facebook or Youtube, who spend their days judging whether particular videos or photos respect the platforms’ terms and conditions. They teach the filtering algorithms what content should be censored. We can also mention the “click workers” who are sharing, “liking,” and promoting advertising or celebrity videos, for which they are paid even less than a cent per click. These people are the real fuel behind viral marketing, which brings the most famous brands to life on the social networks.
RC: The on-demand economy is also a reputation economy and an economy of attention, where the figure of the consumer is central. How can workers involve consumers in their claims?
AC: First of all, by recognizing that the consumer performs the same type of labour as the Deliveroo delivery person or the micro-task worker on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
RC: What is the labour that the consumer performs?
AC: They produce data as well. This data is used to train artificial intelligence. The consumer produces a critical mass of exchanges and transactions that allow the platform to exist on the market. A consumer is an active and crucial part of the existence of the algorithm. They carry out a large amount of productive actions every day, which are similar to those of digital workers. Even the users on Youtube are doing video moderation for free, by reporting those that are not appropriate. Anyone who uses Google is training the algorithm of the search engine to learn the terms most often sought based on the words entered into it, by us and by others. The consumer is a producer. The boundaries between these economic actors are converging, to the point that we can say that when a platform doesn’t want to pay you, they call you a “consumer,” while, if they are willing to pay you (a little), they call you a task worker or micro-worker.
RC: You mentioned “free labour.” What is the role it plays in the digital economy?
AC: This “free labour” was already defined by Tiziana Terranova 20 years ago. Even then, being online was labour, because it produced content for websites and for the sites that were called “portals” at the time. Over the past decade, this idea of free labour has changed, as we realized that the platforms aren’t just buying and selling our content — most importantly, they are buying and selling our personal data and personal information: which brands we like, or what time we usually listen to music; or where we are, using GPS. The free labour of the internet user is not creative work, but rather work done without awareness, and much less satisfactory, as it is invisible. As such, it is alienating, to the extent that we do not realize what the data is useful for, and how it will be used, when we solve a “captcha” on Google or add a tag to an image on Instagram.
RC: What is this data used for?
AC: It is used to produce monetary value for the large platforms that buy and sell information, but it is also used to create value for automation: to train artificial intelligence, teach the chat boxes to communicate with humans, and create virtual assistants like Siri on the iPhone or Alexa on Amazon, who speak to us and help us make choices, or even make them instead of us.
RC: So, is digital labour the common characteristic between the struggles of the bicycle messengers on Foodora or Deliveroo, those of Amazon workers and those in the countries of the “click workers”?
AC: Yes, these struggles are united by a different form of labour than those we have been accustomed to in the last century. Today, digital labour is done through digital platforms, which must be considered a type of productive organization. In addition, these platforms are both companies and markets. Amazon is a more traditional company with a brutal culture of labour discipline, as one can see, for example, in their warehouses, but also in their offices. But Amazon is also a market, a marketplace based on an enormous catalogue of products and on a less well-known form of commerce: that of data. Deliveroo is the same: It is an enterprise, with employees and tangible and intangible resources, and at the same time it is a labour market that connects customers, productive tasks and delivery workers. In this case, the platform uses an algorithmic type of matching, creating a relationship between different subjects. For Amazon, the relationship is between those who produce an item and those who buy it.
RC: You are a supporter of a universal basic income. How would it be able to protect the workforce engaged in digital labour, as intermittent and precarious as it is?
AC: By recognizing the data labour that goes through the platforms. This has already been argued by a report by the French Ministry of Finance in 2013, and in a report by the Rockefeller Foundation last year. The digital giants should not be taxed on the basis of how many data centers or offices they have in a country, but on the basis of the data produced by the users of the platforms. If there are 30 million Google users in Italy, it is fair to tax Google based on the profits they made from these users’ activities. In this way, one could fund a basic income, arising from the digital labour that each of us carries out on the internet or on the mobile apps we use. •
Antonio Casilli is a professor at Télécom ParisTech. He has written, among other books, Qu’est-ce que le digital labor? Editions de l’INA in 2015 together with D. Cardon; Stop Mobbing (DeriveApprodi, 2000); and La Fabbrica Libertina (Manifestolibri, 1997).
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Two hundred people per second now climb onto a dockless bike somewhere in China; the blue dots (above) denote transactions in Shanghai.
Considering that dockless bike sharing platforms were only launched two years ago, in 2015, this growth rate is remarkable.
The biggest company, Mobike, already operates more than seven million bikes across over 160 cities globally – and a merger with its biggest rival, Ofo, is in the offing.
For its US launch Mobike (above) has teamed up with AT&T for its networks. Qualcomm will make the GPS-enabled smart tags attached to each bike. And iPhone maker Foxconn will manufacture the actual bikes.
Negative side effects have accompanied this explosive growth, of course; entrances to subway stations, for example, have been blocked by piles of carelessly dumped bikes (above) .
Beijing and Shanghai have banned the addition of more bikes until their users learn, or are compelled, to use designated parking areas. Wayward user behaviour may well be just a blip; penalties (and inventives) cxan easily be added to dockless bike software.
When sharing platforms enable new relationships between people, goods, equipment, and spaces, the notion of mobility as a discrete economic sector no longer makes sense.
News that Ikea is buying Task Rabbit is further confirmation of this convergence
The bigger story now unfolding (above) seems to be one of system transformation – a peak-car tipping point – that’s been slowly ‘brewing’ for a very long time.
(I don’t believe the concept of “Personal Era” is a timely one – but I’ll come to that in my next post).
For the physicist Ugo Bardi, the decline of a complex system can be faster than its growth – an insight he attributes to the Stoic philosopher Seneca, who wrote: “Fortune is of sluggish growth, but ruin is rapid”.
This could surely be true for a global mobility ecosystem based the private car.
After 100 years of spectacular growth, the Mobility Industrial Complex now confronts three potholes in the road ahead that could each on its own, prove fatal.
The first is energy. Americans now use as much energy on one month as their grandparents did in their entire lifetime – and that rate of increase is accelerating with the advent of ‘cloud commuting’ and ‘smart mobility’. The Stack now runs on about seventeen terrawatts a day.
(The chart above is from The Cloud Begins With Coal, by Mark P. Mills)
The second un-driver of mobility is cost. It now costs 91c to travel one kilometre to travel in your own car, but less than half that (30c/km) if you share. In some Chinese cities, where dockless bike systems are marketed like an app, you can use one for free.
The third pothole awaiting modern mobility – and it’s a big one – is complexity.
There are more lines of code in a high-end Audi than in a Boeing dreamliner – a costly feature will feel more like a bug if the coming software apocalypse turns out to be real.
“Sustainable smart mobility”, in this context, is turning out to be different in degree, but not in kind, from traditional transport and infrastructure planning. It tweaks the means, but not the ends.
Because neither the ‘need’ for perpetually growing mobility is questioned – let alone its biophysical possibility – the road on the downside of Seneca’s Cliff will be a bumpy one if a new story
In part 2 (to follow:) Smart Mobility at the Service of Civic Ecology
ADDENDUM
This writer has learned the hard way that people read things when they are ready to read them – not when they are written. In the hope that the time is now right, the articles below may, now, be useful.
From Bike Chain to Blockchain: Three Questions About Cooperation Platforms and Mobility (2015)
Until now, transportation has been planned to ‘save’ time. In this age of energy transition, would a better criterion not be, how to save calories? Who should own mobility sharing platforms: private companies? cities? us? What kind of ecosystem is needed to support the sharing platforms we want?
Cycle Commerce: the Red Blood Cells of a Smart City (2015)
India’s many millions of bicycle and rickshaw vendors embody the entrepreneurship, sustainable mobility, social innovation, and thriving local economies, that a sustainable city needs.As an ecosystem, they’re also part of the metabolism that makes a city smart. That said, cycle commerce is a challenge for a city’s managers. Many different actors are involved in bicycle commerce – often with differing or downright conflicting agendas. Managing this kind of urban constellation is hard.
Cloud Commuting (2014)
A two-year project in Belgium proposes new relationships between people, goods, energy, equipment, spaces, and value. Its design objective: a networked mobility ecosystem. Mobilotoop asks, ‘how will we move in the city of the future?’ – and does not worry too much about the design of vehicles. ‘Cloud commuting’, in this context, is about accessing the means to move when they are needed (such as the micro-van, above) rather than owning a large heavy artefact (such as a Tesla) that will sit unused for 95 percent of the time.
Caloryville: The Two-Wheeled City (2014)
Something big is afoot. E-bikes in China are outselling cars four to one. Their sudden popularity has confounded planners who thought China was set to become the next automobile powerhouse. In Europe, too, e-bike sales are escalating. Sales have been growing by 50% a year since 2008 with forecasts of at least three million sales in 2015.
Cycle commerce as an ecosystem (2013)
At a workshop in Delhi, Arjun Mehta and myself posed the following question to a group of 20 professionals from diverse backgrounds: What new products, services or ingredients are needed to help a cycle commerce ecosystem flourish in India’s cities, towns and villages?
Green Tourism: Why It Failed And How It Can Succeed (2013)
Packaged mass tours account for 80 percent of journeys to so-called developing countries – but destination regions receive five percent or less of the amount paid by the traveller. For local people on the ground, the injustice is absurd: if I were to pay e1,200 for a week long trek in Morocco’s Atlas mountains, just e50 would go to the cook and the mule driver who do the work. The mule, who works hardest, gets zilch. Can green travel be reformed?
From Autobahn to Bioregion (2012)
A few years ago, Audi’s in-house future watchers noticed an unsettling trend in visions for the future of cities : an increasing number of these visions did not contain cars. Urban future scenarios seemed to be converging around car-free solutions to problems posed by debilitating gridlock, lack of space, and air pollution.Wondering what this trend meant for a car company such as itself, the company launched its Urban Future Initiative to establish a dialogue.
The Gram Junkies (2011)
Gram junkies are those fanatical hikers and climbers who fret about every gram of weight that might be carried — in everything from titanium cook pans to toothbrush covers. Excess weight is not just an objective performance issue for these guys; they take it personally. In the matter of mobility and modern transportation, we all need to become gram junkies. We need to obsess not about speed, or about exotic power sources, but about the weight of every step taken, every vehicle used, every infrastructure investment contemplated.
http://designobserver.com/feature/the-gram-junkies-in-transportation-design-the-key-issue-is-not-speed-but-weight/24178
Is an environmentally neutral car possible? (2010)
The future of the car has been electric for what? Five years now? Ten? The answer is 110 years, for it was back in 1899 that La Jamais Contente (The Never Satisfied) became the first vehicle to go over 100 km/h (62 mph) at Achères, near Paris.Since then, as we produced hundreds of millions non-electric cars — and despoiled the biosphere in the process — all manner of non-petrol cars, including electric ones, have come and gone.
A tale of two trains October (2010)
The fundamental problem with high-speed train systems is not that they burn too much of the wrong kind of fuel. The problem is that – like the interstate highway systems that came before – they perpetuate patterns of land use, transport intensity, and the separation of functions in space and time, that render the whole way we live unsupportable.
From my car to scalar (2006)
To a car company, replacing the chrome wing mirror on an SUV with a carbon fibre one is a step towards sustainable transportation. To a radical ecologist, all motorised movement is unsustainable. So when is transportation sustainable, and when is it not?
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]]>This is a press release by Space10, our partners in organising the Made Again Challenge in Poblenou — Barcelona during the summer in 2016. We brought IKEA designers, local and international makers, to prototype in 5 days how we could redesign material flows at the neighbourhood scale. This project has been the spark of a larger collaboration going on between the partners.
An astonishing transformation is taking place in Barcelona’s former industrial district of Poblenou. The district was once rundown, just like so many other former industrial neighbourhoods in Western cities once manufacturing moved overseas. Today the neighbourhood has become a poster child for urban renewal through a bottom-up approach, creating an epicentre of technology and creativity — leading the Catalan paper Publico and other media to describe it as a mini Silicon Valley for sustainable industry.
The neighbourhood is spearheading a new urban model of resiliency and local innovation, where citizens are perceived not just as consumers but as producers, empowered through access to digital fabrication tools, and knowledge. Poblenou is today an experimentation playground to build the vision of how we might step away from importing most things into the city and export our waste, and instead introduce a circular model, where all resources flow in a closed-loop system within the city itself.
Former NODO maker space, now being turned into a co-working space. Photo: Space10
In fact, Poblenou is already building the infrastructure to be locally productive and globally connected, in order to produce at least half of what it consumes by 2054, using materials that are sourced locally or reclaimed from waste creating a partly circular model, where waste is remade into new products.
The largest Fab City prototype to date
Last summer, the ambitious vision behind the so-called Fab City movement was tested in reality during the Made Again Challenge, a project initiated by SPACE10 — IKEA’s “external future-living lab” — and the Fab City Research Laboratory. Together they created the first and largest Fab City prototype to date in Poblenou — a one-square-kilometre testbed to explore how to rethink and re-engineer our production system in cities.
Poblenou Maker district — Building the Fab City vision in Barcelona at the local scale. Image: Fab City Research Lab at IAAC
Over the course of five days, local workshops, research centers, design agencies and local producers in the neighbourhood was connected into an ecosystem. Biologists, tech professionals, local makers, craftsmen, IKEA designers, and other trailblazers gathered in Barcelona for the project and collected wasted products from the streets of Poblenou in order to breath new life into materials that were heading to landfill.
In Barcelona, each neighbourhood has the “dia de los trastos”, a week day in which large scale trash is taken out to the streets in order to be collected by a public service. Trash mafias and individuals fight for collection of these resources as materials and new furniture. Photo: Space10
The whole experiment is captured in this seven-minute-long documentary.
The Made Again Challenge led to both the mayor of Barcelona and Barcelona City Council to announce support for turning Poblenou into a “Maker District”, part of the ambitious city Digital Plan.
Visit of Barcelona Mayor Ada Colau, Vice-Mayor Gerardo Pisarello, Counsellor Gala Pin and CTO Francesca Bria to Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC, hosted by Director Tomas Diez and President of the Board Oriol Soler. Photo: Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC
According to Gerardo Pisarello, Barcelona’s first deputy mayor:
“We want an economy that’s based on re-industrialization 4.0, an economy rooted in the territory, giving opportunities to new manufacturing linked to new technologies, and that has the participation of the people and neighbourhoods, such as Poblenou.”
The neighborhood has become a significant source of inspiration to other cities, regions and countries that have already pledged to the idea of the Fab City and to become self-sufficient by 2054 — including Amsterdam, Boston, Bhutan, Detroit, Georgia, Paris, Shenzhen, and Toulouse. Many other cities are looking at the Fab City movement for inspiration — and in September, Copenhagen will host this year’s official Fab City Global Summit (followed in 2018 by Paris).
Fab City Documentary at FAB10 Barcelona, 2014.
Interested?
If you find the story interesting, you are more than welcome to contact Tomas Diez, who is director of Fab Lab Barcelona and IAAC, and heading the Fab City Research Lab and was part of organising the Made Again Challenge:
Fab City whitepaper: http://fab.city/whitepaper.pdf
Poblenou is also hosting one of the biggest urban experiments in the form of Super Blocks: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/17/superblocks-rescue-barcelona-spain-plan-give-streets-back-residents
About the author: Tomas Diez, making stuff at Fab Lab Barcelona – IAAC. Smart Citizen and Studio P52 co-founder. Urbanist and technologist.
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]]>The conclusion is that systemic change is required.
Last week I went a restored paper mill in a tiny village in the middle of Sweden. I was there (*) to meet a bunch of people who’ve been given a uniquely challenging task: make the bedroom and bathroom products sold globally by a famous home furnishing giant – – sustainable.When I say that their task is “challenging”, think of it this way. I learned from the Flat Pack Wardrobes – or ‘PAX’ – team, that if you were stack one year’s production of their preassembled wardrobes onto flat bed trucks, the line would stretch, nose-to-tail, from Sweden to Beijing. That’s a lot of wardrobes. And spare a thought for the poor guy in the Beijng car park frantically trying to assemble them all.
These PAX guys are obsessive in their search for ways to reduce the resources used in their products. It’s cause for celebration, they told me, when someone discovers a laminate that’s a few milligrammes lighter, per running meter, than the one it replaces. One of the PAX-men explained their missionary zeal: a milligram here, a milligram there – they really add up by the time you reach Beijing.
I heard similar stories from the mirror team, too: they source three million square metres of the stuff a year. So, too, with the bed team, and the mattress team. They’re all are united in their search for lighter, cleaner, products and materials.
It doesn’t stop with the staff in Sweden. The firm requires each of its suppliers to follow a strict code of conduct – and we’re talking hundreds of firms in over 50 countries. 85 auditors carry nearly a thousand inspections every year – most of them unannounced. If a supplier does not conform – even a big one – they’re out.
The company’s products are only part of the story. Every new store, office, distribution centre, or factory, that the company opens, is located, equipped and operated to be the most sustainable facility of its kind, in the world, at that point in time. 150 of the firms’s megastores will soon be powered by solar panels. Every cup of coffee served in every store is certified organic.
This company-wide effort has been accelerating for 20 years. They’ve taken the lead out of the mirror glass. They’ve removed the chromium from table legs. They’ve taken toxins out of the paint. They’ve replaced the PVC in wallpapers. No more formaldehyde is used in its textiles. The paper in their catalogue is now chlorine-free. They’ve even taken volume out of the mattresses for goodness sake; (they roll them up, to economize on shipping). We’re talking hundreds, thousands of improvements. They’re all recorded on the company’s ‘list without end’.
But there’s just one thing they have not done – and that’s take the keys out of those flat bed trucks. Quite the contrary. The company, which is already huge, is on course to double in size by 2020. The number of customers visiting their giant sheds will increase from from 650 million a year, now, to 1.5 billion a year.
Growth on such a scale is hard to visualize. That line of trucks, stretching all the way to Beijing? By 2020, the line will be twice as long again as it is now. The return line will arrived back to Sweden again. The trucks will be double-parked all over Stockholm. And that’s just the wardrobes.
The senior manager bearing this news put this growth into context for her colleagues.“With this growth we’ll achieve the economies of scale needed to reduce costs” she explained; “we want our products to be available to the many, not just the few”. Growth is needed above all, the manager explained, “to finance the sustainability improvements we all want to make”.
Now there’s a problem with this narrative, and it’s best explained if I talk about wood. The company sells 100 million pieces of furniture every year; it’s thought to be the third largest user of wood in the world. It takes the he sustainability of its supplies very seriously. By 2017, it has promised, half of all the the wood it uses – up from 17 percent now – will either be recycled, or come from forests that are responsibly managed and avoid the excessive use of chemicals and of water.
Wow. 50%.That‘s a vast increase in the percentage of responsible wood in the company’s resource flows. But it begs the question: what about the second half of all that wood? As the company doubles in size, that second pile of wood – the un-certified half, the unreliably-sourced-at-best half – will soon be twice as big as all the wood that’s used today. The impact on forests, of one company’s ravenous hunger for resources, will be devastating.
Together with similar teams in most of the world’s major companies, the committed and gifted people I met last week in Sweden have to live with an awful dilemma. However hard they work, however many innovations they come up with, the negative net impact of their firm’s activities, on the world’s living systems, will be greater in ten years event than it is today.
And all because of compound growth.
This chilling prospect is not the fault of wicked owners. This company has healthy trees almost literally in its blood. Its founder grew up on a farm surrounded by trees. He was born in the same village as Carolus Linnaeus, the father of modern botany. His company’s products are named after the lakes, rivers, and bays he knew as a boy.
There’s no way that this man, or the people who work for him, would mindfully do harm to the land they love. The only explanation is that thoughts, deeds, and experiences have become disconnected on a company-wide scale.
Standing outside that old factory, I tried to imagine myself in the founder’s shoes. How would I react when told of protests that my company was clear-cutting old growth forests in Russia? What would I feel about complaints that rare species of lichens, mosses and other plants were being endangered by my company’s activities?
The founder’s first reaction, I surmised, would probably be indignation. He would be indignant at the complainers’ ignorance of all the work done – over 20 years – to make our products greener. Indignant, too, that the immense effort needed to put certification procedures in place was not being acknowledged.
The founder’s second reaction, I guessed, would be a nagging suspicion that these problems were probably real. The founder would probably reflect that a certification process on its own – in the far-way interior of a dysfunctional state – was unlikely to be effective when so much money was at stake for so many people.
And then? What wood the founder think then?
At this point, I made a mental wish – that that the founder would get angry – angry that the company he had built seemed to have taken on a baleful life of its own. I wished that he would say: Enough! Stop the cutting! We’re going to find another way!
That other way would not be all that hard. No need to fire people. No need to hire consultants. No lectures. No training. One simple step would be effective: Give everyone in the company the opportunity to spend time quietly in an old-growth forest. Allow them to experience the natural energy of a living system that has evolved over many human lifetimes. Leave them to discover the diversity of species, and the wide variety of vegetation on the ground. Ponder the slow decomposition of dead wood, and let the realisation dawn that dead wood is the life of the forest.
Very lightly, one would help people learn about forestry practices that restore ecological diversity; to respect nature’s timeframe; to experience directly, as does the forest, a connection with the land. Reconnected with the lived reality of the earth’s ecological systems, and its non-industrial time frames, the very idea of destroying the earth in the interests of the economy would become – literally – inconceivable.
(*) I was invited and paid to speak at the seminar in Sweden.
[Photography courtesy of Marc Adamus] The article was adapted by John Thackara from a previous talk at the Global Design Forum in London.
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