Save The Whales – Story Skills Edition December 2020

Save The Whales – Story Skills Edition December 2020

Scene 1 – Homes & Supply Chains

Preface – Deep Background –  An Exercise

Here’s a bucket list item for you.  Go to the Monterey Bay on the coast of California.  Two stops.  First the legendary Monterey Bay Aquarium.  First task?  Find a  scientist or tank diver.  First Question?  Ask them to explain their love for the ocean.  Second question?  Get an explanation of what’s happening as a result of CO2 concentrations. Bonus points for asking about all emissions.   Note this person’s name.  They are your first hero.  I don’t need to remind you to share a warm generous thank you, do i?  Then stand in front of the Kelp Forest and just notice things.  A couple of other heroes may emerge.  Next. Go to Santa Cruz. Drive down 41st Avenue to the shore.  Find a parking spot.  Strap a one-year old kid to your chest.  It’s better if it’s your one-year old.   Then, find the sign at the overlook and read.  This is Opal Cliffs, site of The Hook, surfer playground.  One question:  what will you give to the ocean?  You might find another hero.  PS.  An actual one-year old is optional.

Back at home, over your morning coffee, look at one thing in your home and consider how that item came to be.  Perhaps it was a purchase, or a gift, or it was there already.  It doesn’t much matter.  Imagine a map in your mind and trace the existence of this item back to the raw material origins.  You can fictionalize it.  We don’t need to nail down the facts yet.  A humble piece of jewelry, or a picture frame.  A throw rug or ceramic mug.  It won’t take long to imagine each stop along the way of its life.   The sort of mini-miracle of modern industrial making.    Now, for each imagined stop, consider the team of people working there for a moment. A few more heroes may emerge.  Imagine they work in a building, that they drove to, from their home.   More heroes emerge.

How are you holding up in this exercise?

Now. Look at one wall in your home.  Just one wall.  Make a list of how many separate materials you can see.  Just on the surface, a list might look like this: wallboard, paint, wallpaper, trim, picture frame, electrical outlet.  Go back to the exercise of tracing origins.   Congratulations.  You’ve just mapped the global economy. 

Scene 2 – Descent

How are you now, just listening to this? 

I’ll tell you how I am.  I am in awe, swept up in the grandeur, the beauty and the mystery of time, of the planet.  I am distressed, my empathy circuits reaching capacity as I consider the fate of those heroes below the surface.  I am at a loss for how I can help.  An annual donation?  To this problem?  Are you kidding me?  No.  Not at a loss.  Grief.  I am grieving.  I feel proud. Proud that I am from a long line of peoples whose ingenuity has improved the standard of living, who made good on the towering debt of blood and treasure, who brought the longest and widest stretch of peace our species has ever known.  I feel guilt.  For every damn object I touch.  I feel swindled.  Swindled that I chose a good career back in the day, never intending to harm anyone or anything.  Only to find out that if you consider yourself a consumer, and feel guilty about it, my profession is the King of Consumers!  As a profession we order more goods in shear tonnage per project than you will purchase in a year or five. And each of us architects, 400,000 strong in the US, churn out a dozen projects each, every year.  In my career I’ve presided over more than 350 projects.  And not only do I order materials that consume energy and habitat, my buildings bleed energy.  And here on the East Coast of the US, that means fossil fuels. 

I feel confused and indignant.  I have no direct responsibility for having created this situation.  Yet I am beneficiary of its riches.  I feel small, inconsequential.  Yet, day by day, I have made decisions that could and can, just as easily, ease the burdens.

I am angry.  I am frustrated.  I feel ashamed.  I can’t stop the damage I do.  Not without endangering my personal finances upon which my family relies.  The planet is on fire and I am feeding the flames.  Some hero.

Ring a bell?

Today, I am pleased to report a shift.  Whilst I’ve been floating down the river, awash in my feelings, I am noticing more heroes.  People who took their version of this blob of insights and feelings and turned them into action.  If the planet is on fire, then they are fire fighters.  The more I look, the more heroes I see.  Their numbers grow larger by the minute.  The more I look, the more I want to join them.  I am hand paddling my little inner tube over to them.  The tide, the currents are a bummer. But my aim is square.  I am a fire fighter.  I am reporting for duty.

Oh, you too?  Thank goodness, cause I am not going to get over there by myself. 

Scene 3 – Duty Station

My Community of Heroes

My current duty station as planetary fire fighter occupies what the energy industry terms “demand side.”  Electricity is the “supply side.” Renewable energy technologies is the answer there.  And make no mistake, they are an entire legion of heroes.  And they might just be the entire answer.  We on the demand side just might be let off the hook.  But as a good firefighter, I am still gonna do my part. 

In the world of fire fighting, I, as a registered architect, am considered a linchpin:  I prevent fires before they start.  I do that by certifying, with my architects seal and signature, that requires 8 years of education and training to obtain, that I am personally responsponsible for the safe design of a building.   The greatest untold story of 911 is how many people survived the Pentagon and Twin Towers because of the building code.  And it’s been that way since the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

My role in fire prevention is to organize, engineer and specify the safety systems.   It turns out that my role is fairly small.  The owner, our first hero, brings their dream, their treasure and their insurance company, and please, please, god please, a capable, good natured project manager. My engineers, our second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth heroes, bring their expertise for their engineering discipline, backed by decades of rigorous empirical studies. Runner up for the most unsung hero in my business, the general contractor, musters dozens of suppliers and tradesmen to make it happen.  And the winner for most unsung heroes in the entire construction industry, is the building official, the partner to your local Fire Marshall, who will save your bacon no matter who you are or what you’ve done. 

Talk about heroes. 

For the planetary fire, my profession can adopt two technical shifts.  Fortunately for us, they aren’t new.  They aren’t complicated.  They require the correct application of science, which thankfully we have acquired over the last thirty years.  Those technologies are: reducing embodied carbon and high efficiency buildings.  Arcane?  Esoteric?  Confined to the backlot carpenter’s shop of our modern life?  Perhaps.  But don’t go wandering off just yet thinking it’s all sorted and you don’t have a heroic role to play.  

The building code and global economy it spawned, didn’t just spring up by itself.  After the fires, our collective ingenuity was brought to bear.  A concentration of commitment from every single member of the community mustered to do their part.  Without the sustained demand of shopkeepers, industrialists, their bankers or the town council, fire marshalls would not have been able to muster the resources of the entire world of engineering and construction to the task.  We would have kept building what was easy, convenient, known.  The building code was a collective leap, as a society of individuals, to preserve themselves, and us, against the worst side effects of our industrial excesses. 

Among the participants were small messengers between the communities.  People who could speak both languages of construction and daily life.  Who could shuttle back and forth.  Today, I am choosing to inform, encourage, connect and delegate to every person I can find, how to demand the construction industry do their part.  If we succeed, in 20 years we can, single handedly, wipe 20% emissions off the table.  I want to support the heroes that will make that happen, shuttling, in our little spaceship, with a hearty crew.