The Inertia of the Heart
The Inertia of the Heart
Or: Whether the acedia does not begin in the head after all?
As Greta Thunberg, the Latter-day Saint of Environmental Activism, has taught us, major decisions are easy. Much more difficult are the simple decisions, "for example, what socks to wear in the morning.” And because Meister Eckhart already knew this (God is simple), we know this statement leads us into a religious register — which says nothing against the Mystic but should raise serious doubts regarding the realism of some of this cause’s future visions. It is this religious bent, not the idea of sustainability, that’s led me to the sinister statement that the Environmental Movement is the problem that it thinks it's solving. Because if you really want to get to the bottom of the question, it becomes: simply complicated. As the complicated is exhausting, the terrible simplificateur takes a roundabout approach and offers the apocalypse as the final solution. It’s therefore not surprising the debates, pitting the renewables against the fossils as the awakened against old school, only resound with a postmodern religious war’s discursive thunder while the answers are absent. What would be a truly memorable solution to the climate question is: What I don't know doesn't make me hot!
It was 2013 – when I was busy obsessively visualizing the future social and technological state of 2039, reading various futurologists' texts, and watching a multiplicity of YouTube videos (a preoccupation that proved useful when writing my science fiction novel Score1). I saw the futurologists emulating the bad exemplars of their 1960s predecessors because their texts rarely exceeded the extrapolations of present-day trends. But, far more than with these grand visions of the future, I found myself fascinated by the intelligent solutions to the problems themselves. And that was precisely the surprising aspect of my research — a host of innovations with a startling, almost poetic quality in their self-evidence. For example, I came across the work of architect and civil engineer Werner Sobek, who had spent a lifetime pursuing his question of developing a new, lightweight, and less material-intensive construction method.
Sobek's main idea was as simple as it was convincing. Thirty percent of global CO2 emissions are attributable to concrete production. By reducing the concrete mass, we might substantially reduce harmful emissions. Sobek's question was: Does a concrete module have to be such a massive, solid, concrete-filled form — or can't we think of components that use much less material? After all, if the component's function is its load-bearing capacity, it would be sufficient to cast only the structural load-bearing elements in concrete — leaving the rest of the structure filled with air. Of course, from a computational stance, producing such concrete structures wasn’t an uncomplicated task — but what are computers for, if not to solve complexities? As he continued solving his question, he considered using what’s industrially known as Infra-light concrete (made with expanded aggregates such as clay and foamed glass), which gives you a perfect thermally-insulated building block. In short: Sobek's solution had the precise advantage of minimizing concrete’s raw mass — while supplementing its function (as both a load-bearing and insulating material) with intelligent engineering. This coupling allowed Sobek to create an Active House in Stuttgart in 2014 that generates twice as much energy as it needs to operate — by incorporating a self-learning building control software in its design2. Structurally, this is nothing other than a repetition of the intellectual vault forward, which elevated the Medieval Gothic cathedral above its Romanesque predecessors. However, unlike the heaping of stone upon stone in the latter (creating the rough, massive appearance of Romanesque church walls), the deception of the Gothic cathedral is in its modularization of stone and, most importantly, understanding its construction as a manifestation of vaulting lines of force — meaning the masonry need hardly be thicker than twenty centimeters. What’s even more remarkable beyond minimizing material use is the reversal of the design’s point of view. Because the architect designs the building from top to bottom, using the highest point of the vault to deflect the forces outward — explaining the structure's three naves, in fact making the static solution illustratively architectural — form follows function3. Following this logic, the transition to lightweight construction proposed by Sobek, with its integrated software control, is a logical continuation of an insight that’d already revolutionized Medieval architecture.
The second technology that surprised me was the work of a Swiss chemist named Michael Grätzel. Like Sobek's, his question was energy-related — whether it was possible to construct a solar cell similar to how plants permitted photosynthesis even if the sun didn’t directly hit their light-sensitive surfaces (as under diffuse light conditions) and still be capable of harvesting solar energy. What Grätzel devised was a dye-sensitized solar cell that could be manufactured using less material than the traditional photovoltaic systems, which, historically rooted in transistor and computer development of the 1950s, required considerable amounts of energy and raw materials to produce.4 Another advantage of this so-called dye-sensitized solar cell is it can be applied to foils and used on curved surfaces.
The Grätzel cell, which debuted in the Graz Science Tower, is the conceptual model for the organic solar cells that have blossomed in recent years with an efficiency (even if it still lags behind classical photovoltaics) now approaching 11% under laboratory conditions. This interlinking of bionics and electronics represents a significant novelty in general knowledge development. Yet, in contemporary debates, such novel combinations are often overlooked. When we speak of an agricultural revolution, we usually recall 19th and early 20th centuries developments. But there’s hardly any thought or insight into how new developments in spatial informatics can profoundly change agricultural practices that protect the environment and conserve resources. For example, a drone flying over a field equipped with appropriate sensor technology can capture various parameters about its current status: Moisture, crop conditions, pest infestation, and the like. A built-in chip transforms the images from a hyper-spectral camera into multiple maps providing the owner with information about the field’s state, which then can be used to improve its growing efficiency. Instead of using cross-bed or watering-can systems of allocation, irrigation, fertilizer, and pesticide requirements can be precisely targeted and delivered to the field as needed — resulting in markedly reduced resource use and more efficient agricultural practices. The technology’s benefit to a community is seen in documentaries about its use in rural African settlements. With the help of drone observation and monitoring, the drudgery of village women’s up to an hour-and-a-half daily walks to inspect and irrigate their distant fields can be significantly reduced. And here, as in the case of Sobek's method of making lightweight concrete, this solution can only be executed with the help of computers transforming knowledge as a means of enhancing efficiency — while at the same time conserving resources.
The fourth innovation that surprised me over a decade ago was vertical farming — that it’s possible to grow plants vertically on several levels simultaneously. With this approach, you don't need fertilizer as it’s sufficient to simply provide them with water, a minimum of essential nutrients5, and light from LED lamps. To my astonishment, these laboratory conditions weren't detrimental to plant growth — quite the opposite. Without adding fertilizers and using minimal amounts of space, it was possible to obtain a crop yield many times greater than obtainable in the wild. In Holland, where this process was applied on an industrial scale, research began on how light frequency and intensity alterations affected plant growth. Being curious, I got a cheap little unit — and watched in fascination as chili, peppers, lettuces, and all sorts of herbs suddenly grew in the winter garden of our Berlin city apartment. However, even more striking to me was how observing these daily growth processes awakened something within me I’d not, up to then, been able to claim for myself — a kind of caring combined with a growing appreciation for these growth processes. Finally, and most curiously, the growth of the plants seemed like a metaphor for the slow emergence of a book – like turning pages, the enormous psychological effects that vertical farming could exert started making themselves clear to me while watching a documentary on a school project in the Bronx. Here, a hotspot school had been equipped with a vertical farming system, and the children, all from problematic social backgrounds, had been involved in the work of maintaining it.
The effect of this simple intervention on the student body was striking. Student absenteeism, which had previously been a good 40%, dropped massively. An awareness of growth processes emerged — and a pride in their own productivity. Very soon, the school was busy bringing this technology and acquired knowledge to other schools in the neighborhood as a pioneering spirit spread through the community. When one considers that a large part of the student body had previously only come into contact with junk or convenience food, it becomes clear how infinitely important the experience of such a growth process is for one's sense of self — or, conversely, to what extent the absence of such an experience results in an effect of deprivation. What we call alienation and sweepingly branding as remoteness from nature isn’t much more than post-modern society’s condemnation of couch potatoes to inactivity — indeed, it’s enveloped them in a comforting cocoon that stifles any pride, any sense of self. So, it isn’t nature that is missing, but its translation into a metaphor — that one can take a growing plant as an image of one's own productivity, one's self-efficacy.
Once we have said the solutions to the Future’s big questions are not simple but simply complicated, the simple and the complex can be neatly separated. Complicating matters is that the solutions are concerned with using materials (not to mention the economic constraints in which technology must succeed). One must grapple, as the case may be, with the fabrication of concrete; the statics of engineering; the question of thermal insulation; the bionics of organic materials; the sensor programming of drones; hyperspectral cameras; and LEDs, not to mention the unsolved problems and unanswered questions arising with any future technology. On the other hand, the above examples certainly point to a connection — a simple one. The recurring Leitmotif in each of these applications is the fact that programming plays a crucial role in problem-solving. The control system for the active or passive house, the drone bringing in terrain information, and the program ultimately monitoring LED light management and plant growth in the glass house — all point to the computer as culturally integral. Having become a program, such knowledge, previously accessible only to a few experts, can now be scaled. You don't have to be a master of quantum mechanics to use an LED lamp or a Grätzel cell. Ultimately, all of this becomes one Machine that makes achieving an ever greater effect with an ever smaller amount of material possible. It isn't by chance that the computer chip itself is a memento of sustainability, as today’s silicon crystal has undergone a billion-fold increase in efficiency compared to its predecessor in the 1950s. Robert Noyce, one of Intel’s co-founders, made this connection clear a very long time ago. If the material world, he argued, had kept pace with the acceleration of the chip, a flight from San Francisco to New York would take only the blink of an eye and wouldn't cost two cents — and New York's notorious parking problem would also be a thing of the past — because once in New York, people would fold up their car without further ado and put it in their pocket.
What is strange about the contemporary climate debate is that all the concrete solutions to the problem, just like the miraculous increase in efficiency of the computer world, play no role in it. Yet the Corona lockdown made it clear that Second Life has long since migrated into our realities; indeed, operational system exemplars of solutions to energy conservation questions can be found here. If you'd prophesied to a contemporary in 2019 that capitalism could continue to run with a fraction of air travel, indeed that international air travel could be reduced to 5%, he would probably have dismissed this question as insane musings. But this is precisely what happened — the Zoom company took over the task of teleportation. That this fact doesn't play a role in the current debates (just as the exemplary facts above, which could be extended at will, aren’t cited) leaves only the conclusion that the threatened climate catastrophe isn't about the actual matter at hand but about something else entirely: namely, that a state of emergency translates into a form of an ultimate exaggeration. And what can you do if you don't know what socks to wear today? You can proclaim disaster and summon the Riders of the Apocalypse...Or, thinking in a very practical and activist way: why not go to the museum and quickly empty the contents of a Heinz can of tomato soup onto Claude Monet's painting Les Meules?
"People are starving, people are freezing, people are dying. We're in a climate catastrophe. And all you are afraid of is tomato soup or mashed potatoes on a painting." (The Last Generation, action at Museum Barberini, Potsdam)
A science fiction novel Martin wrote for his son on what a future click economy might look like. See Burckhardt, M. Score, Munich/ 2015. [Translator’s note]
This is the B10 Active House [aktivhaus-b10], designed by Werner Sobek and built as the world’s first active-design house. The story of its design, building and integration of AI-system control are exemplars of what the Environmental Activism and Degrowth movements miss in the simplicity of their Apocalyptic declaration. [Translator’s note]
See my chapter on cathedral building, Im Schatten der Kathedrale, in Metamorphosen von Raum und Zeit. Frankfurt/M. 1994.
In this sense, there are physical limits to the use of renewables.
Plants make food from sunlight, carbon dioxide, water, and 17 essential macro- and micro-elemental nutrients acquired through their root structures. Fertilizers are primarily composed of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium and spread around the plant's soil, where bacteria it down with organic material to supply plant nutrients. In contrast, hydroponic systems efficiently provide all the plant's essential elemental nutrients for growth using minimal resources and materials. [Translator’s note]