Design Museum Magazine: The Climate Change Issue - Fall 2021 - Issue 020

Fall 2021 Issue 020 US $20

Africa’s Animals Photos capture efforts to save earth’s natural wonders 7

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Sustainable Fashion Clothing is one of the biggest polluters Page 70

How to Meet Your Climate Responsibility Design gas out of your life Page 78

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Contents.

DEPARTMENTS 4

Contributors

12 Q&A

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From the Editor

14 Design Activity

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Recommendations

FEATURES 18

VIBRANT CITIES • SUSTAINABILITY

Modeling the Future How SPACE10’s SolarVille project is lighting the path to democratized access to clean energy

By Susan Gladwin, Climate Tech Business Leader and Sustainability Strategist

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SUSTAINABILITY • SOCIAL IMPACT

Cultivating Health Equity through Afro-Indigenous Stewarded Farming A Q&A with SUSU commUNITY Farm’s Collaborative Director, Amber Arnold Interviewed by Sara Magalio, Editorial Producer, Design Museum Everywhere

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SUSTAINABILITY

Saving Wonder A photo essay on our connection to the wild

By Ami Vitale, National Geographic Photographer and filmmaker

Have a great design impact story? editor@designmuseumfoundation.org

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FRONT COVER PHOTO BY AMI VITALE, DESIGNED BY AVA LIAO

Interested in advertising opportunities? advertise@designmuseumfoundation.org

Fall 2021 • Issue 020

The Sustainability Issue

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SUSTAINABILITY

What Does Good Look Like?

By Ren DeCherney, Business Development Manager for Manufacturers and Interiors, International Living Future Institute (ILFI)

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CIVIC INNOVATION • ENTREPRENEURSHIP • SUSTAINABILITY

Cultivating a Counter to Climate Change Regenerative Practices in Agriculture A conversation between Jonathan Anderson, Human Centered Design Practitioner, and David Leon, Co-founder and Executive Director, Farmer’s Footprint

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SUSTAINABILITY • SOCIAL IMPACT

Designs for Living with Rising Seas Students Envision an Adaptive Future

By Claire Martin, Project Manager, ReMain Nantucket

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ENTREPRENEURSHIP • SUSTAINABILITY

Creativity Under Constraint with SXD A Zero Waste Design-Tech Startup

By Shelly Xu, Founder of SXD

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CIVIC INNOVATION • SUSTAINABILITY

How to Meet Your Climate Responsibility Design gas out of your life. Then design it out of your town.

By Lisa Cunningham and Jesse Gray

DESIGN MUSEUM MAGAZINE ISSUE 020 FALL 2021 (ISSN 2573-9204) IS PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY DESIGN MUSEUM FOUNDATION. 100 SUMMER STREET, SUITE 1925, BOSTON, MA 02110. POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO DESIGN MUSEUM FOUNDATION, 100 SUMMER STREET, SUITE 1925, BOSTON, MA 02110.

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Contributors.

Amber Arnold Amber is the Collaborative Director and Co-founder of the SUSU commUNTIY Farm, located in southern Vermont. She is passionate about co-creating liberated spaces for all beings to thrive in Vermont and finds nourishment and joy in communal processes deeply rooted in ancestral wisdom and earth-based healing.

Ami Vitale Ami is a Nikon Ambassador and National Geographic Magazine photographer who has traveled to more than 100 countries, bearing witness to violence and conflict, but also to surreal beauty and the enduring power of the human spirit.

Throughout the years, Ami has lived in mud huts and war zones, contracted malaria, and donned a panda suit—keeping true to her belief in the importance of “living the story.” She lectures for the National Geographic LIVE series, and she frequently gives workshops throughout the world.

Ava Liao Ava is a Graphic Design Intern for Design Museum Everywhere. She is a dual major in Media Studies and International Relations at Claremont McKenna College. In her free time, Ava enjoys playing around with video game UI, reading about medieval history, and trying to perfect her homemade bubble tea recipe.

Claire Martin ​​ Claire is a Project Manager at ReMain Nantucket, an organization dedicated to the economic, social, and environmental vitality of the Nantucket community.

With a focus on coastal resilience, Claire's work through the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge has allowed her to pursue her passion for climate, equity, and storytelling—which she believes can be one of the most powerful agents for change.

David Leon David is the Co-founder and Executive Director of Farmer’s Footprint, leading a rapid-growth nonprofit actively cultivating a global coalition of stakeholders across the food value chain to accelerate the universal adoption of regenerative agriculture. David is also a Partner and Co-founder of Biome Capital Partners, providing new pathways for investment into regenerative ecosystems. David brings a passion for building organizations that inspire and empower in pursuit of audacious change. He lives on the island of Lana’i with his partner, Arielle, their dog, Charlie, and cat, Nalo.

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Jesse Gray Jesse is a Climate activist, Brookline Town Meeting Member, and Neurogeneticist and proponent of benevolent electrification. He was a co-petitioner of Brookline’s major Fossil Fuel Free building electrification bylaws, 2019-2021. Along with Lisa Cunningham, Jesse builds teams that deliver climate leadership and action.

Jonathan Anderson Jonathan is an Entrepreneur, Design Practitioner, Coach, Strategist, and Facilitator currently based out of Massachusetts. He is also a Design Museum Everywhere Council Member. Jonathan recently transitioned from the corporate world, and he is currently working on projects ranging from promoting regenerative agriculture to civic engagement and community building. He is currently working with affiliates of the Farmer’s Footprint and the Global Regeneration CoLab to promote awareness of regenerative farming, rebuilding local economies, and healing the land so that we can heal ourselves.

Kate Murphy Kate is a graphic designer, creative director and nature enthusiast. Kate has spent 30 years working in design consulting with a focus on branding and product development. Her comprehensive, award-winning design programs include identity, print communications, product packaging and literature, information graphics, interiors and color consulting. Kate is a member of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Photographers Without Borders, and supports several environmental organizations including the Sierra Club, Sea Legacy and Only One. Kate is passionate about getting involved in combating the climate crisis through design innovation and raising environmental awareness. She is thrilled that she can facilitate Design Museum Everywhere in the publication of this issue as its Editorial Production Liaison.

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Contributors.

Lisa Cunningham Lisa is a life-long climate activist, co-petitioner for Brookline’s bylaw “Prohibition on New Fossil Fuel Infrastructure in Major Construction” passed in November 2019, a Brookline Town Meeting Member, and Architect with Warner + Cunningham, Inc. Since working on the passage of this bylaw, she has worked with partners to build a building electrification movement throughout Massachusetts.

With Jesse Gray and others, she has also continued to work to pass legislation at the local level with the additional goal of advancing building electrification at the state level. Individuals, working together, can make impactful change.

Ren DeCherney Ren is a former Alaskan and former interior designer living in Portland, Oregon, where she talks to designers and manufacturers about healthy building products.

She’s quite possibly the only person who loves talking about sustainability, but doesn’t like being in nature itself.

Sara Magalio Sara was the Editorial Producer at Design Museum Everywhere during summer 2021. Originally from New Jersey, Sara graduated from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas with a BA in Journalism and a BFA in Dance Performance. Sara received her MS in Journalism from the Boston University College of Communication in January 2021, and she is currently pursuing her JD at the Duke University School of Law. Through her experience working with local publications in Dallas and Boston and her background in performance, Sara connects her love for the arts with a passion for sharing impactful stories with the community at large.

Shelly Xu Shelly is an ex-Creative Director from Instagram and a recent graduate of Harvard Business School. She is committed to reversing fashion’s negative impact on our environment—a reality she has witnessed first-hand during her travels across China, Japan, and the United States as a child. Shelly is the founder of SXD. She has spent over ten years prototyping sustainable designs and has also worked at Prada and McKinsey.

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Sophia Richardson Sophia Richardson is a multidisciplinary graphic designer based in Boston, MA. Currently she is the Senior Graphic Designer at Design Museum Everywhere, where she facilitates the visual design of the museum's publications, exhibitions, and programs.

Stephanie Cardon Stephanie is an artist, a parent to young twins, and a professor at a public arts college in Boston. She spends many of her waking (and sometimes dreaming hours) reflecting on the climate crisis and its injustices, building projects and curriculum to empower students, and working in community to bring about systems change. Her favorite activities are permaculture gardening and wild swimming.

Susan Gladwin Susan is a business executive and entrepreneur with expertise in technology, market strategy, and climate tech. Her work spans several decades with large brands (including Apple, Autodesk) launching iconic products and advancing sustainability in design and engineering of the built environment, manufacturing, and energy infrastructure. A frequent speaker, published author, and former faculty member at the CCA MBA in Design Strategy, she advises and invests in early stage climate tech companies and is passionate about innovation for equitable decarbonization.

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From the Editor.

Hope and Action For Our Planet It's hard not to feel doom and gloom when I think about climate change. The western states are on fire. Hurricane Ida just blasted the country. Our days are warmer—a lot warmer, let's say hot. Our sea level is rising. Biodiversity, the variety of life, the blanket around our planet, is plummeting. The renowned documentarian David Attenborough recently said, "The loss of biodiversity and the degradation of ecosystems pose a major risk to human survival and development." We have a lot of work to do.

You might be thinking, this really isn't affecting me. Well, to quote author Lauren Morrill, "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care for other people." The effects of climate change are already dramatically impacting vulnerable and historically underinvested in communities in the U.S. and around the world.

The fact is, doom and gloom are here. As if we needed a written reminder, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report makes it very real: climate change is here; we've crossed the point of no return. The report states that since the 19th century, human activity has raised the planet's temperature by 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit. We did that mainly by burning coal, oil, and gas for energy.

What's worse, unless CO2 emission immediately (as in today, right now) dropped dramatically (that's not going to happen), we're likely to reach a rise of around 1.5 degrees Celsius within 20 years, so things are guaranteed to get way worse. We did this to ourselves! The time for action was 100 years ago, but as the saying goes: better late than never. The report does (thankfully) offer a sliver of hope. If governments and people worldwide band together and coordinate to stop adding carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2050, there's the

potential to level off at 1.5 degrees of warming and save us from a truly nasty climate future.

So let's do that.

What gives me hope are stories like the ones in this issue. There are people and organizations working to ward off total climate disaster. There's the work of Lisa Cunningham, Jesse Gray, and others in Brookline, MA to design gasoline out of their town. Folks like Amber Arnold with SUSU commUNITY Farm and David Leon of Farmer's Footprint are re-establishing a responsible connection between people, land, and food. Ami Vitale's photos document the rescue of entire species affected by climate change. These stories, and more, give me hope. And hope is great—we're happy to communicate hope in this magazine, but let's face it, hope is not enough. If you're not taking action—any action—you're complicit. I'm complicit. I hope you enjoy this special issue of Design Museum Magazine, and I hope it inspires you to take action, however seemingly small and insignificant it might seem, trust me, it will matter in the end for our little blue planet—our home.

Sincerely,

Sam Aquillano Executive and Creative Director Design Museum Everywhere

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Recommendations.

Embodied Carbon 101 Series The Boston Society of Architects “Embodied Carbon 101 Series” is “a 12-part program series designed to give AEC professionals of all shapes and sizes the knowledge they need to incorporate embodied carbon considerations immediately into their work,” according to their website.

Andrea Love

architects.org/embodied-carbon-101

La Via Campesina La Via Campesina is an incredible organization representing hope for many working on the frontlines of environmental justice. Learning to Die in the Anthropocene by Roy Scranton is an excellent if not depressing entry into understanding the broader implications of climate change and human behavior.

Jesse Flores MEMBER

Al Gowan's Books I was first introduced to what we now call sustainable and ecological design in the 1990s by my late design history Professor Al Gowan. As it turns out, Gowan was a student of both Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek. These two figures were ahead of their time as they sought to reframe design as a force for planetary good. Two of Gowan's books, "Shared Vision: The Second American Bauhaus" and "Victor Papanek, Path of a Design Prophet," touch on these two figures and their influence. Gowan was an excellent writer, and thus he makes these lesser-known design histories both informative and engaging.

Dan Vlahos Assistant Professor, Designer COUNCIL MEMBER

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TVA EnergyRight's EV Research My colleagues at TVA EnergyRight recently produced a video series after their foundational EV adoption research found a lot of interest in EVs, but also a lot of misinformation about the realities of owning and operating an EV. Through the iterations, the most critical lesson was that keeping the messaging local is crucial. When they talked about EVs generally, most people responded with skepticism and dismissal. When they showed EVs in landmarks the audience drove past frequently, they were much more likely to view EVs as a realistic possibility for their lives. We partnered with the co-founder and CEO of Earth Rides, an all-electric rideshare, to host the series. Earth Rides has grown like gangbusters in Nashville and just launched in Austin. They are worth checking out as well.

Brent Taylor MEMBER

Ezra Klein's Interview with Saul Griffith This interview with Saul Griffith blew my mind! In a good way! He talks about how solving our climate crisis is not only achievable, but would also make our lives so much better. He talks about how it's important to show people what we're fighting FOR, so people feel energized to keep up the work. He mentions how in an electrified house with less combustion, we won't have to vacuum as much and I was sold.

Ren DeCherney Business Development Manager Manufacturers and Interiors, International Living Future Institute (ILFI) MAGAZINE CONTRIBUTOR

Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta was one of the few books I read twice.

First to take in the concepts and the novel way he structured them for us, and then again to move through the experiential applications more fully.

This sounds dry when in fact it's a rich, humorous, clear-eyed view of our current civilization under an Indigenous gaze. Tyson Yunkaporta's work, and others like the "Edge Effects'' series on the Plantationocene reveal how much the extraction paradigm drives the crisis of climate injustice.

Susan Gladwin Climate Tech Business Leader and Sustainability Strategist MAGAZINE CONTRIBUTOR

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Q&A. In what ways can design make the most positive impact on the environment?

Through engaging museum experiences. Museums are reportedly the most trusted source of information in America, rated higher than local papers, nonprofit researchers, the U.S. government, or academic researchers. Museums can leverage this high level of public trust to engage visitors in environmental education and literacy programming. By empowering the public with the information they need to make passionate connections and informed decisions, museums can help sustain healthy communities both human and not.

Matt Kirchman President & Creative Director ObjectIDEA Museum Planning & Design DESIGN IMPACT SOCIETY MEMBER

Design Thinking is the process by which we can empathize, define, prototype, test, and solve climate issues, but we can't do it alone! We have to collaborate and co-create solutions that are inclusive, equitable, and harmonious for humans and our planet.

It's been years since research concluded that "the greenest building is the one already built," yet we continue to demolish and replace far too often. Reuse of old buildings is crucial to a sustainable future.

Architecture has long had a preference of starting building projects from scratch, but a staggering amount of waste is created in the process, embodied energy is lost, and delicate ecosystems are disrupted.

Architecture programs should better integrate adaptive reuse and materials restoration.

City planning and advocacy groups can guide local development by urging investment in existing buildings. Community engagement can help people better understand the potential of underutilized real estate in their neighborhoods and the incentives available for rehabilitation. Demolition or building new should always be a last resort if we want to support stronger communities and a healthy planet.

Sarah Locke MAGAZINE SUBSCRIBER

Kelly Simpson

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From the radical to the practical, designers make choices every day that have significant long-term impacts on the environment. In landscape architecture and urban planning, we are constantly collaborating with other disciplines and the public in thinking across a range of scales (from the territorial to the material detail) in order to envision an improved future for the built environment. This multiscalar perspective allows us to draw new connections, to link existing systems and processes that enable us to re-configure our environment in ways that enhance ecological or social performance, create new experiences, or invite a broader range of people to participate in shared activities.

This includes large-scale planning efforts that consider multiple environmental and social dynamics across long time periods. And, it includes designing intimate spaces that allow people to relate to and experience the natural world and develop awareness of the dynamics of change. The eco-consequences of our choices are many, from the climate impacts of the materials we use in our constructed landscapes to the storytelling, data-gathering, and recommendations made through city-wide planning efforts.

Amy Whitesides Director of Resilience and Research Stoss Landscape Urbanism

The impact that matters most is cutting emissions, so that we can draw down global warming. And this is something that designers at all scales can address right now—and, in fact, we must. Aiming for 2050 or 2030 is not useful. We have passed the 1.0 degree C threshold, and the impacts are being felt. Bold action now. In the built environment sector, this means tackling operational and embodied carbon with everything we've got. We have to work toward the 1.5 degree C carbon budget, or the impacts will be catastrophic. And finally, we are defining design excellence holistically— including climate action, equity, and health.

Kira Gould

We need to get to zero emissions as soon as possible. It’s not a dramatization: Lives are at stake. We must use our influence within the industry and on every project to not just do less harm but be a regenerative force. The water leaving our site should be cleaner than when it fell, the air should leave the building purified; that’s what the AIA 2030 Commitment is about—making every facility a working piece of the ecosystem rather than a source of damage. This is not advocacy; it’s being responsible corporate citizens.

MEMBER

Daniel Jaconetti Daví Parente Schoen Associate Stoss Landscape Urbanism

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Design Activity.

By Stephanie Cardon, Artist and Associate Professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Think through and illustrate your role in our climate challenge using the dandelion as a metaphor, and make a useful zero waste utensil holder for meals on-the-go.

Repurpose 2 pieces of cloth cut to 20" x 20" each Find 1 ribbon or cord, 30" long, folded in half for the ties Assemble Scissors, pins, needle & thread or sewing machine, iron Also useful Textile markers for optional decoration

Be a dandelion! Dandelions are remarkable plants, too often villified as weeds. Their deep taproots aerate poor soil, improving drainage and mineral uptake for other plants. Their leaves and flowers are edible, medicinal and full of nutrients. Early blooming, they provide needed food to pollinators. And their seeds disperse abundantly, making the plant an apt metaphor for the power of collective action!

• Roots Who, where, and what are your roots? How will climate change impact them?

What knowledge and wisdom can be found in them? How can you return nourishment to the place from where you come?

• Stem What are your skills, talents, and resources? Where do you have access and influence? What values ground you?

• Leaves What needs to be done in order to build a healthier and more just world? Learn about climate solutions at www.drawdown.org. On which one will you focus?

• Flower What brings you joy? What nourishes you? How do you rejuvenate? Finding where climate action intersects with your sources of joy will help you stay the course in hard times.

• Seeds Communicate your concerns, needs, and actions to your family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, elected officials. Bring this activity to your communities. Join an existing climate action group and organize!

View the activity instructions on the next page.

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DESIGN ACTIVITY STEPS

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Lay two 20" x 20" pieces of cloth face-to-face.

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Flip inside out, iron flat, tucking in open edge seams. Fold a pocket 6" up and pin in place.

Sew .25" in all the way around starting 4" up one side. You will need this gap to flip the project right side out. Then trim off the corners without cutting your sewing.

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Unpin the top right edge of the pocked and tuck your folded ribbon tie in. You will be sewing this in place as you make the pocket and close the open edge.

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Plan your pockets width for whatever utensils you'd like to carry, and then sew accordingly.

Fold the top over your cutlery to keep it in place before rolling.

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VIBRANT CITIES • SUSTAINABILITY

Modeling the Future.

How SPACE10’s SolarVille project is lighting the path to democratized access to clean energy

By Susan Gladwin, Climate Tech Business Leader and Sustainability Strategist The moment I laid eyes on SolarVille,1 I fell in love. It brought back the enchantment cast by childhood train sets, a toy that lets us design a miniature world that sets things in motion.

SolarVille is a little wooden village, in perfect 1:50 scale, with the tiniest working, roofmounted solar panels generating renewable electricity powered sunlight that lights up tiny light bulbs in each of its 20 different kinds of dwellings. In short, it’s really cute. Most amazingly, it automatically facilitates energy sharing between neighboring households.

Through the connections of wires and blockchain technology, homes that don’t have panels and aren’t producing any energy automatically “purchase” from houses that have extra energy to share.

SolarVille makes the abstract idea of a “self-sufficient community-driven microgrid”2 real. It shows us what the concept would look and act like by making it as powerfully evocative as a toy.

SolarVille was made in 2019, but the concept has so far been implemented for big people in only a few places on the planet. But it could be part of how we meet our energy needs–and needs to be. Emissions from our residential lifestyles are set to double, as more people use appliances and other machines for heating and cooling, let alone chargers for electric vehicles. And with energy used in buildings pro-

ducing as much as 40%3 of global greenhouse gas emissions, it needs to come from electricity that is powered by clean renewable sources like solar, wind, or geothermal.

When it comes to the climate crisis, energy is only one slice of the greenhouse gas emissions pie. And solarized electricity is only one of the many climate tech strategies being deployed to reduce emissions. Greentown Labs, a US-based climate tech startup incubator, defines climate tech as two types of technological solutions. Those focused on mitigation reduce greenhouse gas emissions and thereby prevent future increases in global temperature that cause the climate crisis, while adaptation solutions build up resiliency to the disruptive and destructive effects of changes to climate.

Climate tech is about people, communities, and infrastructure. It spans how we eat and grow food, shelter and cook, move ourselves and our things, and use and replenish resources of all kinds, in the context of equitable climate restoration. Done well, climate tech solutions consider our interactions within the spheres and cycles of land and sky, water and energy, and how these can invigorate local livelihoods and species survivability.

SolarVille is a project of SPACE10, an independent research and design lab that develops concepts to challenge and inspire its sole funder, IKEA. Together with outside collaborators, the team at SPACE10 ignited an exploration of the democratization of clean energy, PHOTO BY IRINA BOERSMA, COURTESY OF SPACE10

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asking how clean energy might be made more accessible, more affordable.

They focused on demonstrating a decentralized and democratized future of energy systems based on peer-to-peer energy trading networks, which, while a powerful solution domain, is not immediately obvious to diverse audiences such as policy makers, decision makers, and citizens of all kinds. There is power in seeing a complex system in action, but what if it doesn’t exist yet?

Done well, climate tech solutions consider our interactions within the spheres and cycles of land and sky, water and energy, and how these can invigorate local livelihoods and species survivability.

That’s where playful research comes in.

“Playful research is an approach, where we translate valuable insights into visions of better tomorrows. Taking research and making it visual to render it more engaging, exciting, and accessible,” explained Mitsuko Sato, Head of Creative for SPACE10.

The making of SolarVille was underway when solar engineer Neel Tamhane joined SPACE10 as Solar Strategy Lead.

Neel was already trying to realize the concept of SolarVille in Bangladeshi households through a social enterprise called SOLshare.

Neel started at the New Delhi SPACE10 satellite office in his home country of India; the Copenhagen headquarters needed him to bring hands-on working innovation grounded in local context into the clean energy conversation they were catalyzing.

In India alone, over 300 million people are without electricity. Prior to SOLshare, Neel worked on a project in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation to set up 300 mini20

PHOTO BY IRINA BOERSMA, COURTESY OF SPACE10

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PHOTO BY IRINA BOERSMA (TOP) • PHOTOS BY NIKOLAJ ROHDE (BOTTOM) • ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF SPACE10

grids in four states in India, converting diesel-powered telecom towers to solar to circulate electricity to villages and marketplaces and bridge between them to the national grid.

“You can build and implement new ideas more easily in places like Bangladesh and India that you can’t in the US. The difference in context and the pressing need enabled us to build new systems, experiment, and bring energy access to many households," says Neel.

It’s proving to be easier to build SolarVilles in the global South than the North. “While the global North has to transition existing energy systems, the global South is looking at parity for energy access,” notes Neel.

The brief of our climate design challenge is daunting. But seeing an intuitive solution like SolarVille come to life brings joy and inspiration to engage.

Similar to the mobile phone leapfrog in telecommunications made by developing countries, the global South can jump straight to providing clean electricity for the 3.5 billion people4 who lack access to it, without the restrictions created by existing infrastructure and all that goes with it. And as Neel points out, “Being able to turn on a couple lightbulbs is an outdated story.” Energy needs and expectations have evolved over the decades, as is spelled out by SPACE10 in this compelling study5 of 40 families in Peru, Kenya, India, and Indonesia. Neel says, “Governments aren’t looking at only extending utility lines but also setting up integrated electrification pathways6 within communities.”

This has huge implications for our collective energy and climate future. The global South needs to leapfrog to electricity that is clean so that its citizens can enjoy its health, economic, educational and safety benefits; but as

the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, the global North must shift to renewable energy as fast as possible. Neel emphasizes the magnitude of the problem. “Forty percent of the world's emissions still come from the US. Each American consumes 34 times more energy than a resident of India or China.7 We need to go all out everywhere.”

The brief of our climate design challenge is daunting. But seeing an intuitive solution like SolarVille come to life brings joy and inspiration to engage. Neel comments on watching people interacting with SolarVille play.

“Ten-year-olds run around trying to figure it out. You can lift a house, cover a panel to stop it from generating electricity, then see other houses start selling faster to it. You see the beauty of watching these little houses trade energy between themselves.”

SolarVille has been on the road, taken to the UN Habitat Center in Nairobi, Kenya8 and to the SPACE10 office in New Delhi. Neel says, “Engaging people with SolarVille is how we can move from design innovation of a novel concept that stops there to something real, activating the policy changes and the capital flow necessary to drive implementation of it.”

Seeing SolarVille in action, utilities around the world have started piloting systems like it. As playful as it is, SolarVille shows us the power of climate tech design to animate and realize complex nested systems, from one home, to a neighborhood, to an empowered climate-positive world. •

1.

https://SPACE10.com/solarville-democratising-accessto-clean-energy

2.

https://SPACE10.com/project/solarville

3.

https://www.theclimategroup.org/built-environment

4.

https://www.energyforgrowth.org/memo/3-5-billionpeople-lack-reliable-power

5.

https://space10.com/project/life-without-energy

6.

https://www.seforall.org/interventions/electricity-forall-in-africa/integrated-electrification-pathways

7.

https://www.npr.org/sections/ goatsandsoda/2015/12/08/458917881/india-to-u-s-cutback-on-your-consumption

8.

https://unhabitat.org/story-solarville

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SUSTAINABILITY • SOCIAL IMPACT

Cultivating Health Equity through Afro-Indigenous Stewarded Farming.

A Q&A with SUSU commUNITY Farm’s Collaborative Director, Amber Arnold Interviewed by Sara Magalio, Editorial Producer, Design Museum Everywhere The SUSU commUNITY Farm is an Afro-Indigenous stewarded farm and land-based healing center in Southern Vermont that elevates Vermont’s land and foodways. The organization accomplishes this by co-creating a lifeaffirming and culturally relevant platform for Black, Indigenous, people of color, youth, and under-resourced individuals, and allies to thrive and experience safety and connection while beginning to develop the tools and agency to heal from the trauma of colonization.

SUSU aspires to co-create an equitable and just culture for the global majority to thrive in Vermont that focuses on access to safe and affirming food, community, and job opportunities, by offering culturally relevant spaces that center Earth-based and Afro-Indigenous health and healing traditions as well as reclaiming and centering the wisdom, stories, and legacies of past generations.

In the following interview, SUSU comUNITY Farm’s Amber Arnold, who serves many roles for the organization, including as its Co-Executive Director of Community Outreach and Community Food, shares with Design Museum Everywhere how this organi-

zation came into being, defied the odds to thrive through the COVID crisis, and will continue to positively impact its community in the future.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sara Magalio: Amber, I would love to start by having you outline how you got started with SUSU and where the inspiration for creating this community came from.

Amber Arnold: My collaborative director Naomi Moody and I had actually started a different organization first—an LLC called the SUSU Healing Collective—and we really wanted to create a space in Brattleboro, VT for Black and brown people to access safety, belonging, connection, and a space to experience healing. We incorporated sound healings, yoga, and different African spiritual practices into the offerings of the organization. We also had a botanica with herbs that we grew and tinctures that we made in house. We had planned that, in the future, we would want to expand the collective and start this farm project, and so we opened that component of the community two weeks before COVID shut PHOTOS COURTESY OF SUSU COMMUNITY FARM

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PHOTO COURTESY OF LITTLE POND DIGITAL

everything down. We were open for only a matter of days before we had to close, and it was really sad, because we had people come all the way from Washington, DC to kick off the opening, and it was just really fun and wonderful to see everyone come together to promote this common goal.

In the following weeks, as the pandemic raged on and the country reckoned with the murder of George Floyd, on top of having to worry about COVID and social upheaval, our community was also worrying about accessing food, because in the area that we live in, a significant portion of the community had the resources to hoard food—which was a phenomenon that occurred throughout the country. We also saw in Vermont that community supported agriculture, or CSAs, are quite popular, and those sold out very, very quickly.

This is because a lot of lower income families applied for funding from the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) to get a stipend to be able to pay for their CSAs, but by the time that they were accepted for the funding, the CSAs were already purchased by people who could pay for them up front.

Seeing this chain of events, we feel strongly that under-resourced communities should not have to worry about where they're going to access nourishing food.

It is a well known fact that consuming healthy food benefits immunity, and we have seen in the events of these last months how crucial it is to maintain a strong immune system. On top of that, while police brutality and state sanctioned violence is a horrific reality that Black and brown people in this country grapple with each day, it is a disturbing truth that more people of color in the U.S. die from food related illness than any other type of state-sanctioned violence.1 To combat this lack of access to nutritious food in our community, we decided that we were going to start a GoFundMe and raise money to purchase CSAs for Black and brown families in our area.

We wanted to raise enough to purchase 25 CSAs to start, and within three days, we had raised about $20,000, which was enough to

purchase those CSAs and welcome 30 families into our community. On top of the money that we raised, there was a wonderful positive response from a lot of local businesses, who donated eggs, bread, more vegetables, and self-care products.

So with the success of our initial fundraising efforts, we began in earnest our first program for SUSU commUNITY Farm, centering on our belief that food is a birthright that should not be treated like a commodity, and that what the Earth gives to us abundantly should be something that everybody can access. As we expanded our programs, the money just kept coming in, and at that point we could not purchase any more CSAs, because all the farms were just sold out. So we decided to work toward another vision that we had, which is purchasing land to make food security a permanent part of this area. We were inspired by the words of Fannie Lou Hamer,2 who said, “If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. If you give him land, he will grow his own food.” We want to purchase this farm and set it up in a way that the farm would, in perpetuity, be accessed by people of color, so that it wasn't owned by us, but it could always be in the hands of the community, as a safe place for people to go. We are currently in the process of purchasing the farm, and we should be on the land in October.

SM: It's just incredible that you were able to create such an amazing organization in the first place, but to do so during a global pandemic is truly remarkable. Being that this magazine issue is centered on climate change and sustainability, can you share your thoughts on the interplay between racial inequities and climate change, and how that connects back to disparities in access to nutritious foods?

AA: I think climate change is really a direct result of white supremacy, and having people in positions of power whose relationship with the land is purely transactional—they see themselves as above the land and treat it in that way. So a lot of work that we do, espe27

cially with white folks, is around connecting back with the Earth. It's much harder to exploit the Earth when you have a deep, personal relationship with the Earth, and you see it as a sovereign being instead of as this thing to claim ownership over.

As we designed the functionality of the CSAs, the concept of creating a sustainable process was paramount. Instead of focusing purely on deliverables, we strive to follow the mantra of, "How much does the Earth want to grow, and how do we work with the Earth in this process?

How do we do things in a way that is aligned with the way that nature naturally works?”

Where a lot of traditional farming involves going really against the way that nature works, costing tons of money and resources, we've really centered Afro-Indigenous growing practices—working with the land, saving seeds, and not taking in more than we need.

We've been looking into all the aspects of how to operate in a way that gives equally to the Earth. For example, with soil amendments, oftentimes people will purchase fertilizer and other expensive additives that use mining and really exploitive practices in order to create those products. The products are also filled with chemicals that are then going into the soil, which can have harmful long-lasting effects. We have been sharing easy ways to create natural fertilizers with our community to promote this sustainable practice. For instance, you can go to a local orchard and get all the rotten apples from the ground, and then fill a bucket with rainwater and those apples to make apple cider vinegar. Then, you can go to a local restaurant and take their compost scraps, extract them in the apple cider vinegar you made, and use that to feed your plants.

This is actually much better for the soil too, because it involves using natural and locally sourced components.

SM: It is so important to promote ways that we can adopt more sustainable practices in our everyday living, and it’s great that SUSU can use it’s platform to do so. I understand that in addition to the organization’s agricultural ini28

tiatives, SUSU also functions as a healing center. Could you delve into different ways that you provide these healing attributes, aside from what you've previously shared?

AA: Because we are still fundraising for our farm, we are currently focusing on developing different programs that are going to connect people back to the Earth and back to Earth-based practices within our lineages.

One of those programs is the Storyteller Garden. Our plan is to build multiple gardens that feature the produce and agricultural practices of the people that are part of our community. These gardens will reflect all of the people who are a part of our programs, and it will connect people back with the traditional ways that their ancestors grew food, which they have been disconnected from through colonization.

We also are providing Food as Medicine classes that teach people how to use the vegetables and the foods that our community members grow for the CSA boxes, with the goal of bringing the magic and the ritual back into the way that we work with food. And this idea of ritual in food preparation can be seen in even the most seemingly menial of tasks.

For instance, with washing our vegetables, instead of thinking of it as a laborious task, we turn it into a spiritual bath, including prayers, song, and herbs that we put into the wash.

We have an herbalism program that centers on Afro-Indigenous practices around growing herbs and learning about their lineages, in terms of healing and using food as medicine. These products that are made from the classes will be sold along with the produce in our CSA boxes, allowing the larger community to experience the products and learn more about the unique cultures that they are derived from. And for 21 weeks, BIPOC families in Southern Vermont receive a free box of these organically grown, culturally relevant veggies, medicinal herbs, and other goods from local Vermont businesses.

We are also working on developing robust youth programming, which we are calling the

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Youth to Liberation pipeline. This initiative will connect youth in our community to Black and brown mentors, providing them with a stable, sustainable community. This will be a place for our youth to belong, to connect back with the Earth, and to move through the trauma that is held in our body, working with the land as a resource for healing.

SM: I am glad that you brought up the Youth to Liberation pipeline; I was particularly interested in this program as I was learning more about SUSU ahead of this conversation. I know sometimes it requires a specific, nuanced approach to reach out to younger people who may not be as interested in certain ideas. Can you share how SUSU plans to get younger people interested in farming, their ancestral agricultural practices, and their cultural lineages in general?

AA: We are thinking of the youth program as an alternative and a preventative program to the juvie system, mental health institutions, and other programs that we have in place right now in Vermont. Everything connects back to the land, and I think in our culture we often compartmentalize nature out of our everyday lives, because we may not frequently come into contact with it. We are working to center on what the youth care about and what is most important to them, while figuring out ways to merge their interests with the cultural ideals that we are sharing in our community.

For example, one of the programs that we're planning to have on the farm is on-site barbering services for Black and brown folks. In our area, if you want to get a fade, or a haircut specifically tailored for your hair texture, you would have to drive to Springfield, which is 45 minutes away. This is a long ride for a haircut, especially when you're a young person that doesn't have a car. For all individuals, and especially younger people, having a haircut that you can feel confident in is so crucial to both self-perception and the way they are able to interact with their peers. So we have Black and Puerto Rican barbers in Springfield who

are planning to come to the farm regularly and do free haircuts and free fades, and to teach the youth about hair and how to cut, style, and care for it.

In bringing the youth to the farm and having them be able to get their hair cut, engage in activities like dance battles, and socialize with their peers, they can connect with each other and the land in ways that make sense to them and gradually become more comfortable in this farm space. As they become more acclimated to this environment, this allows for opportunities to engage with farming or growing food, opening the doors of curiosity to this world of sustainable, mindful farming. A huge part of how we can resist systems of oppression is through the ways that we care for our bodies, and we can do that by growing food using the teachings of our ancestors, with all of the wisdom and the beauty that they had that was so connected to agriculture.

SM: Hearing about all of these programs, it is clear that this is so much more than a farm.

You are creating a space where community members of all ages can truly thrive. I know that during the height of the pandemic, when the physical communal space could not be utilized, SUSU provided virtual programming that allowed the collective to continue to connect. Can you speak to the work that SUSU has done and continues to do virtually, and how that intermixes with the physical programs that typify the organization?

AA: The virtual programming was a tough one to adapt to. I feel virtual programming is not my favorite at all, and there's a lot of cons to it, but there are also distinct benefits. At the present time, virtual programming has been essential because of COVID, and also because we don't have that physical farm location yet, so once we're on land and once it's safer to do so, a lot of our programs are going to be transitioned into an in-person format. In the meantime, we have been developing a teachable website. It's a platform that has online courses and talks that are pre recorded and materials 31

that our community can access. The ultimate goal is to have both in-person courses and the programs that we're doing right now virtually, so that we can bring as many people into the community as possible. We've had a lot of people take our virtual classes that are from all over the world, and we want to allow them to continue doing that. We definitely invite all people to participate in our programs, and that’s really beautiful, but our programs are also very much designed with the specific embodied experience and culture of Vermont, because Vermont is such a unique place. When we talk about organizing and racial justice, being in this very rural area is a big part of our identity, so we've really focused our programming to support people in growing in the specific environment that we live in.

SM: It is great that SUSU has found a way to retain a global audience while still catering to the experiences that are specific to the geographic area that its physical participants reside in. I know that you guys are very much still in an evolutionary phase, and you're working through getting to your final goals of what 32

you want SUSU commUNITY Farm to be. Five years into the future, or even beyond, where do you want to see the organization evolve to?

AA: That is a question that we have been reflecting on as an organization. We recently did a comprehensive review of our business plan, and I remember thinking, "Oh my gosh, we have so much in here that we're planning to do. This is going to take such a long time."

But for the future of SUSU, I envision us having this space on land, doing these programs, really impacting change and transformation in the whole Vermont landscape and culture, and having secure systems to support the youth, people of color and, and white folks who are doing this work.

As I previously mentioned, we really think of our offerings as preventative and alternative programs. The goal is to create systems for people to go into to access safety and connection, to actually heal and grow without the policing system by being a part of a supportive community. I do see in the future us being able to hold more land and maybe even build housing for Black and brown people, creat-

ing these spaces for people where they really feel like they belong, are not over policed, and have their autonomy. As we increase our resources, we need to continue to hire staff that are invested in our organization and helping it grow. One thing that's really important to us is hiring people that don't necessarily have a college degree or extensive experience, but that have street knowledge and life experiences that can help them contribute to the community. You do not need any type of farming experience to join SUSU; we are all about empowerment through teaching new skills. In order to hire staff like that, though, we also have to increase our capacity of having some staff who know how to farm already, to mentor new people coming in.

I would also say that, for us, a goal that we will continue to promote is providing a product that naturally attracts people to our community. As we have delved into researching advertising strategies and promoting SUSU, we have seen that there is so much focus on, "How do we advertise so we can get people to come to Vermont or do these things?" For us, we believe that we don't really need to advertise anything. We just need to create spaces that people enjoy being in and want to be in, and then they will come, instead of focusing on having to persuade people into coming to a space.

When I close my eyes and envision the future of SUSU, I picture this really long table with beautiful flowers, Afro-Indigenous food, candles and little fireflies. I see Black and brown kids running around and playing, and families sitting on the farm, laughing, dancing and just enjoying being here and having the space to really open up their bodies and minds and feel like, "I'm safe, I belong, and I get to breathe fresh air and be with the trees.

I am home."

SM: I really love your point about not having to advertise, market, or trick people into consuming a product; instead, it's about creating a community that naturally brings people in because they want to be there. To wrap up, can you share how people can get involved

with the organization or donate their time and resources to facilitate SUSU’s mission?

SM: We have a GoFundMe page and a space on our website where people can donate. We definitely invite people to volunteer for the CSA project, helping to grow and harvest food and deliver boxes of food. Donations of anything are helpful. Financial donations are helpful. People who can organize folks they know who have access to resources to do giving campaigns are helpful. People who have access to things that they want to get rid of, like a farm truck, trailer, or different farm equipment that they are willing to donate are always helpful as well. As our name suggests, SUSU commUNITY Farm is all about unity, and our robust group of volunteers are essential to us furthering our mission of offering life affirming spaces for Black, Indigenous, and people of color to thrive.

To learn more about SUSU commUNITY Farm and how to get involved with the organization, please visit their website at susucommunityfarm.org

1.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/ PMC2729116

2.

https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/ biographies/fannie-lou-hamer

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Saving Wonder.

A photo essay on our connection to the wild

By Ami Vitale, National Geographic Photographer and filmmaker

These giants we share this planet with are part of a complex world created over millions of years and their survival is intertwined with our own. Without them, we suffer more than a loss of a species. We suffer a loss of our imagination, a loss of wonder, a loss of beautiful possibilities. When we see ourselves as part of nature, we understand that saving nature is really about saving ourselves.

PHOTOS BY AMI VITALE

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Daring Giraffe Rescue A group of Rothschild’s (Nubian) giraffe were marooned on Longicharo Island, a rocky lava pinnacle in the middle of western Kenya’s Lake Baringo. The rising lake levels turned the peninsula into an island, trapping the giraffes.

In a dramatic rescue, two were transported across the lake on a makeshift raft, to Ruko Community Conservancy.

Today fewer than 3,000 Rothschild’s giraffes are left in Africa, with about 800 in Kenya. “The hope is that this is just the first step of reintroducing these giraffes back to their historical home across the Western Rift Valley, hopefully over the next 20-30 years,” explained David O’Connor, president of Save Giraffes Now who helped orchestrate this inspiring move with the Northern Rangelands Trust and Kenya Wildlife Service.

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Reteti Elephant Sanctuary Reteti Elephant Sactuary, located in Northern Kenya, is the first community-owned elephant and rhino sanctuary in East Africa operated by the indigenous Samburu community. The sanctuary provides a safe place for injured elephants and rhinos to heal and a home for orphaned elephants and rhinos affected by poaching and the ivory trade. The communities living side by side to the wildlife hold the keys to saving what is left.

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The Last Goodbye The image above is of Joseph Wachira saying goodbye to Sudan, the last male northern white rhino on the planet, at Ol Pejeta Conservancy. I saw Sudan for the first time in 2009 at the Dvůr Králové Zoo in Czechia (the Czech Republic). I can recall the exact moment.

Surrounded by snow in his brick and iron enclosure, Sudan was being crate trained— learning to walk into the giant box that would carry him almost 4,000 miles south to Kenya.

He moved slowly, cautiously. He took time to sniff the snow. He was gentle, hulking, otherworldly. I knew I was in the presence of an ancient being, millions of years in the making (fossil records suggest that the lineage is over 50 million years old), whose kind had roamed around much of our world.

At 45, Sudan was elderly for his species. He had lived a long life, but now he was dying. In

his last years he experienced again his native grasslands, although always in the company of armed guards to keep him safe from poachers.

And he had found stardom—he’d been affectionately dubbed the “most eligible bachelor in the world.”

Sudan’s death was not unexpected, yet it resonated with so many. When I arrived, he was surrounded by the people who had loved him and protected him. Joseph Wachira, the man pictured with Sudan in the photo above and one of his dedicated keepers, went to give him one more rub behind his ear. Sudan leaned his heavy head into Wachira’s. I took a photo of two old friends together for the last time.

To see more of Ami's work, visit: amivitale.com

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SUSTAINABILITY

What Does Good Look Like ?

The Living Product Challenge Reinvents Manufacturing

By Ren DeCherney, Business Development Manager for Manufacturers and Interiors, International Living Future Institute (ILFI) The question, “What does good look like?” guides everything we do at the International Living Future Institute. We help designers, product manufacturers, and organizations to create buildings, spaces, and products that give back more than they take.

Our programs provide a framework to create places and products that work with and are inspired by nature, that rely only on renewable energy, replenish our waterways and aquifers, eliminate exposure to toxins, generate opportunities to engage with one another in community, and restore our relationships to nature and to one another. ILFI believes that what we need is a positive, hopeful vision of the future, and our programs like the Living Product Challenge provide that—a tangible example of what a Living Future looks like.

Philosophy Imagine if everything we used in our daily lives, no matter how small, helped create a better world. Clothing, tools, electronics, building materials, toys—every manufactured good— could contribute to a healthier future. Imagine if even the packaging of everyday products wasn’t discarded without consideration, but designed to create value and abundance over time. Why should we accept environmental and social degradation as a consequence of all the trappings of a modern society? As

Paul Hawken has said, “Doing the right thing should be as easy as falling off a log.” The average person shouldn’t have to be a toxicologist or a life cycle expert to understand if the purchases they make support their values.

The Living Product Challenge, developed by the International Living Future Institute, is a philosophy, product certification, and advocacy tool all in one. It provides a revolutionary framework for manufacturers to create restorative products, and it fundamentally shifts the way products are designed and manufactured, while giving consumers the information they need to choose better products. The Challenge seeks to dramatically raise the bar from a paradigm where simply doing less harm is laudable to a world in which doing good and giving more than we take becomes the standard.

It aims to transform how we think about every single act of design, production, and purchasing as an opportunity to positively impact the greater community of life and the cultural fabric of our society.

Over the last 20 years, awareness of green manufacturing has grown alongside awareness of green building. Just as there have been huge steps forward in the design, construction, and operation of buildings, progress has been made in the manufacturing realm. Still, compared to the rate of change necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change and other environmental challenges, our global progress in this regard has been minute and barely recordable.

PHOTO BY NIC LEHOUX, COURTESY OF THE BULLITT CENTER

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Every major ecological system is in decline and the rate of that decline is increasing.

Global temperature increases mean shifting rainfall distributions, acidified oceans, and potentially catastrophic sea level rise. Nothing less than a radical change in manufacturing is required. Indeed, this focus must be the great work of our generation. We must remake our cities, towns, neighborhoods, homes, offices, and all the goods we use within them as part of the necessary process of reinventing our relationship with the natural world—re-establishing ourselves as part and parcel with creation.

Since we launched our flagship challenge, the Living Building Challenge, in 2006, it has inspired and motivated rapid and significant change. Projects have cropped up all over the world: currently there are more than 18 million square feet of Living Building Challenge projects underway in more than two dozen countries, each project showing it is possible to create regenerative buildings in any community.

The Living Product Challenge reinvents product manufacturing in an equally revolutionary fashion because we believe the materials used to construct our buildings must be held to the same high standard as the buildings themselves. The things we place within and around them shouldn’t undermine our health and well-being; they should instead create positive social and environmental change. In turn, designers and consumers need a mechanism they can use to compare products so they can select products that are healthy and sustainable.

Incremental change is no longer a viable option.

Sometimes the amount of change we need to tackle seems unsurmountable, and that the choices you make as a single individual make no difference. However, taken together, the amount of power the design community wields is impressive. Every year, through their specifications alone, designers and architects control billions of dollars of the US GDP and billions of square feet of construction. They have the power to literally transform the world 48

around us, and we’re starting to understand the impact these choices have on our bodies and in our communities.

Take for example, “Little Things Matter” project by Bruce Lanphear for the Simon Fraser University and the Artemis Fund.

This was a national study of 5,000 children in Canada which found heavy metals and pollutants are present in young children’s blood.

This included finding mercury in 89% of the kids, Organophosphate (OP) pesticides from food in 80% of the kids, BPA in 96% of the kids, PCBs (a persistent pollutant banned in the 1970’s) and PBDE flame retardants in 100% of the kids, and lead in blood of 100% children regardless of race. This upends the narrative that once installed, products and materials do not affect us. We are finding that they have such a profound effect that we are passing these effects down to our children before they are even born. Designers and architects have not only a direct impact on this, but a responsibility to mitigate the potential for harm as they select the materials that go into our buildings.

In addition, as we begin to better understand the direct correlation between the chemicals in building materials and the effects on building users and inhabitants, designers and architects may start to be held liable for those effects. On August 9, 2018, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) wrote a letter to EPA regarding the Asbestos New Use Rule where they stated "historically, architects and other design professionals involved in a construction project strive to avoid liability for hazardous construction materials such as asbestos, lead, PCBs, mercury, etc. Recent lawsuits and regulatory citations have pinned responsibility on design professionals and building owners who seemingly had nothing to do with the exposure that caused, or could cause, a crippling illness.”

In this letter, the AIA recognizes the power designers have to make an impact and the potential liability if they do not take this responsibility seriously. It’s time to harness

CERTIFICATION SUMMARY MATRIX PETAL

IMPERATIVE

PLACE

1. Responsible Place 2. Habitat Exchange 3. Living Economy Sourcing

WATER

4. Water Footprint 5. Net Positive Water

ENERGY

6. Energy Footprint 7. Net Positive Energy

HEALTH + HAPPINESS

8. Red List 9. Transparent Material Health 10. Human Thriving

MATERIALS

11. Responsible Industry 12. Regenerative Materials 13. Net Positive Waste 14. Net Positive Carbon

EQUITY

15. Ethical Supply Chain 16. Equitable Investment 17. Just Organizations 18. Social Co-Benefits

BEAUTY

19. Inspiration + Education 20. Beauty + Spirit

KEY

HANDPRINTING IMPERATIVE

CORE IMPERATIVE

REQUIRED FOR PETAL ACTION

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that power! Until recently, designers have been limited in their efforts to select sustainable products by a general lack of transparency and reporting on the ingredients in a product and the manufacturing process required to make them. Enter the Living Product Challenge!

The Living Product Challenge label takes complex, multi-attribute information about a product and provides it to consumers in an elegant, easy-to-understand format. Like everything we do at ILFI, the certification is performance-based, which means it relies on performance data and continuous monitoring rather than modeled or anticipated performance. Manufacturers must provide proof that they are complying with the standard on an annual basis to an Institute-approved, third-party assessor. This means consumers can be certain they are selecting products that don’t just say they’re sustainable, but have the data and performance to prove that they are truly sustainable and regenerative.

It’s time to wield your collective power, as designers and as individuals. Whether you are working as a designer, or simply selecting new home office furniture, you can transform not only our built environment, but also the way we design and produce materials around the world.

The Living Product Challenge comprises seven performance categories, or Petals: Place, Water, Energy, Health + Happiness, Materials, Equity, and Beauty. Petals are subdivided into a total of 20 Imperatives, each of which focuses on a specific sphere of influence. This compilation of imperatives can be applied to every conceivable product—of 50

any size and manufactured in any location— whether it is a new innovation or a reinvention of an existing item.

The Living Product Challenge incorporates the Declare label, also developed by ILFI, which allows manufacturers to publicly disclose the chemical ingredients that make up their products. Products with a Declare label and Living Products must disclose this chemical information down to 100 parts per million, so consumers can see what is in a product, much like a food nutrition label. Not only that, but a Living Product must contain no chemicals on The Red List—a list of the worst-in-class chemicals in terms of destroying the environment and ecosystems and are detrimental to human health, both for factory workers and end users.

Living Products must also disclose how much carbon, energy, and water is used to create the product as well as how much waste is created during the manufacturing process.

This radical transparency not only informs consumers about a product, but it is also meant to inspire other manufacturers to make positive change by showing that it is possible to design truly sustainable products.

Products that succeed in this challenge can claim to be the greenest and most socially responsible on the market: their manufacturing processes are restorative, regenerative, or operate with a net positive impact, and they have made the proof available to consumers.

Handprinting: measuring positive impacts Unique to the Living Product Challenge is the concept of handprinting, which is our way of measuring the positive impacts a company has on the earth and their community. The Challenge is the only of its kind to measure both Footprints and Handprints.

The Footprint of producing a product is the sum total of negative impacts caused by the processes necessary to produce that product.

In the Challenge, these are represented by the carbon, energy, water, and waste impacts of the manufacturing process.

To qualify for the Living Product Challenge, manufacturers must evaluate the manufacturing process from “cradle to gate:” by including not only the manufacturer’s operations, but all the processes of their suppliers such as the energy, materials, and equipment needed to extract the raw materials. This makes up their Footprint. Often, most of the product’s Footprint happens upstream of the manufacturer, through supply chains of energy and raw materials. The problem with only measuring Footprints is that smaller Footprints are still Footprints. We can never achieve a Footprint of zero, and in solely focusing on Footprint reductions, we face diminishing returns.

It is often said that you can only change what you measure. So far, sustainable manufacturing has largely focused on measuring and reducing our Footprints. While this is a critical place to start, it is a tragic place to stop, since it does not account for the positive impact a product or company can make in the world.

Through the Living Product Challenge, manufacturers can not only measure and reduce their negative impacts — but they can now also grow and expand their positive impact with clear, measurable actions.

We call these Handprints. The Handprint of a product comprises all the positive impacts we cause to happen across the life cycle of a product and can be created anywhere and everywhere outside of the supply chain and in our communities. The only requirement is that the Handprints be real and measurable, and there are myriad ways to create them. Some Living Product manufacturers have invested in the energy retrofit of a school, installed rainwater catchment systems in a nearby community, or protected a key ecological habitat. There is no limit to the potential of businesses and their employees to create positive impacts, and such impacts can count as Handprints as long as they can be measured.

ity and ecological inspiration to design products and business models that create positive Handprints as they shrink their negative Footprints. In turn, designers can use the Challenge to specify products that they know are truly sustainable. Living Products contain no toxic chemicals to factory workers or end users, are regenerative, and have measurable positive impacts in their communities. What’s not to like?

It’s time to wield your collective power, as designers and as individuals. Whether you are working as a designer, or simply selecting new home office furniture, you can transform not only our built environment, but also the way we design and produce materials around the world. Start asking for products with a Declare or Living Product Challenge label, so you can see what is in a product before specifying or purchasing it. Talk to the companies whose products you are considering about the positive impact they can have through their products. Seek out healthy products in every project. Every small step you take contributes to a larger transformation. Let’s do it! •

Making a big impact, together.

Using Handprinting, designers of Living Products can go further than is typical when designing a product. They use human creativ51

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CIVIC INNOVATION • ENTREPRENEURSHIP • SUSTAINABILITY

Cultivating a Counter to Climate Change.

Regenerative Practices in Agriculture A conversation between Jonathan Anderson, Human Centered Design Practitioner, and David Leon, Co-founder and Executive Director, Farmer’s Footprint In the following conversation, Human Centered Design Practitioner and Design Museum Everywhere Council Member Jonathan Anderson leads a conversation with David Leon, the Co-founder and Executive Director of the Farmer’s Footprint, a coalition of farmers, educators, doctors, scientists, and business leaders aiming to expose the human and environmental impacts of chemical farming and offer a path forward through regenerative agricultural practices.

Jonathan and David discuss the pitfalls of traditional commercial farming, what can be done to combat the negative impacts of farming on the environment, and how designers can get involved in catalyzing the change that is necessary to promote sustainable and regenerative agricultural practices into the future.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Jonathan Anderson: I am thrilled that we are able to have this conversation, because this is an opportunity for us to put some really good information out there that allows people to reframe the way that they see some of the challenges that we face around climate, agriculture, and human health. And to begin this information exchange, David, I would love

for you to introduce yourself and talk about Farmer's Footprint.

David Leon: Absolutely, so I serve as the Co-founder and Executive Director of a nonprofit called Project Biome; the front-facing program is called Farmer's Footprint. We founded the organization in 2019, with the initial inspiration coming from my co-founder, Dr. Zach Bush, who's a clinical physician, was a cancer therapies researcher, and has worked in academia. When Zach transitioned out of cancer therapies research, he started a rural clinic in Virginia and he noticed right away that there was a lot of chronic disease in those populations. He was working with nutrition as one of the main ways that he was treating those patients, putting them on plant-based diets in an effort to lower what he understood to be high inflammation markers, perhaps coming out of the food that they were consuming. However, even with the healthier diet, he was actually seeing inflammation markers increase, in some cases. That got him really curious about what was going on with the produce that they were eating.

To find some answers, he started to look into food production. Specifically, he looked at glyphosate, which is probably the most ubiquitous herbicide that's used in modern agriculture. He began his analysis along the Mississippi River and started measuring the water for glyphosate. His full grasp of what PHOTOS BY LEIA VITA MARASOVICH

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was going on really came to fruition, though, when he started meeting some of the farmers along those systems. What he found was farmers grappling with the effects of modern agricultural practices—the changes that they were seeing in their land and that they were feeling themselves. Zach found communities trapped in a prescriptive, big-agriculture paradigm, where someone comes out to the farms— the equivalent of a pharmaceutical rep—runs some tests, and prescribes farmers a slew of inputs to treat the problems that were in the fields.

For the farmers that want to transition from this system, they often face stigma in their communities, and really grapple with the internal tensions of, "This is everything I was taught not to do. I was taught to trust the science on this. We have all of these chemical inputs that produce green plants and increase yield. And this was supposed to be the right way to do it." However, they are now seeing that, year after year, those input costs increase, the soil is unable to sustain production that it once was easily able to do, and there is an ever increasing need to add more and more fertilizers and pesticides.

We saw this tension between the scientific community trying to explain all of these complex relationships going on between the plants, the soil, and the human microbiome, and there is still so much work to do on that front. We've unleashed a massive number of chemicals at a population scale, in a very uncontrolled scientific experiment that we're all a part of, unwittingly or not.

The goal of the Farmer’s Footprint is to tell the stories of these farmers that would resonate with people—we are all attached to this, and we all have a stake to play. We've gone about building a robust public platform and media organization that humanizes farmers and shares regenerative practices, and the way that this line of thinking can alter individuals’ mindsets and health, their communities, and the landscape. We sought to develop a mission that would radically scale adoption of regenerative transition. We focus on public aware54

ness and scaling education for stakeholders in those value chains. We also work on scaling the economics of a region; scaling the dollar amounts of investable capital that can come in and meaningfully be deployed on the ground in service of this transition that we're undergoing. We have a multi-trillion dollar food, agricultural, and industrial complex that stands at the precipice of a massive shift in the way that it approaches its work.

We created an organization that's about progress over perfection. We're not demonizing the farmers or the corporations for the practices that have come to be over the arc of history. We strive to create a space that is free of prescriptive solutions and more about collaborative co-creation. That means remaining agnostic as it relates to certification paradigms that have largely stratified access to food and have not delivered the economics to farmers that was promised. We need to create spaces for first steps, small steps. And then from there, we need to find those pressure points that will radically shift systems. That's what we're focused on, on a day-to-day basis.

JA: One thing that strikes me is that the process to transition to regenerative agriculture is not as simple as turning on a switch and making the change. I think one of the major impediments that I'm seeing is not so much the actual physical work in the transition. Rather, it’s the actual people part of it— enabling farmers to make that transition and step out beyond the system that they have now. Is that something that you're seeing, as well? That it’s not only about being educated, but also it’s trusting to make that leap and take that transition period, which could have an impact on revenue.

DL: That's absolutely right. We often cite that the biggest barrier to transition is between the farmer's ears. And that is not entirely fair, either, because it's not just the farmer. There's a whole system around them, including processing, logistics, CPG, and consumer tastes.

There's a lot of shifting that needs to happen, and a lot of it is in this ingrained mindset, in

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organizations, and in the public. This is why we unabashedly pursue the storytelling strategy.

As an entry point for the design audience, I often think about the work that we do as deeply searching for metaphor. I think the best designs allow us to see or understand something in a way that maybe had not landed previously, or doesn't land just in reading a book or being exposed to a TED talk. It's this concept of, “How do you have an embodied sense of what this agricultural actually means?”

Metaphors can be really valuable tools for seeing something through a different lens, a lens that, perhaps, has relevance to us in our dayto-day lives, but isn't the obvious choice to go to in a farming context or a food context. We need folks with deep design experience that understand the process that it takes to actually change cultural norms and mindsets, which I think a lot of designers have great potential to be contributing to.

It's become clear to us, with the organizations that have been in the space, working on the science, and producing some really exciting results around what these practices can generate, that despite this progress, the knowledge accrued hasn't broken into the public sphere in a way that is truly embodied and felt. In order to get people on board with this and get their expertise in front of the challenges that that incumbent community is facing, we need to also extend to designers an invitation that says, "The expertise that you've built, building giant brands or producing art that moves culture—we need that same expertise in service of this work."

JA: It's as simple as that. In my research recently, I have seen a general takeaway that we don't need extremely complex systems to farm. Regenerative agriculture is really mimicry of nature. Of course, market gardening doesn't exist in nature, but we try to mimic it as much as we can. The real point here is simple tools and processes can make the farm more efficient and reduce the cost. But that initial transition can be a little bit challenging, because in that transition, the systems have to recalibrate and equalize. Rather than looking

at the dirt as a medium to grow plants, we're actually looking at the microbiology in the soil to then grow the plants. It's just a different shift. We're becoming soil farmers instead of just farming plants. It's a holistic system that we're looking at.

DL: Correct, and I think what regenerative practices show us is we need to start reorganizing our ways of being in organizations and in relationship with one another to one of deep collaboration. As you get into the complexities of the microbiome and the incredible consequences that come out of that diverse collaboration, you start to wonder about some of the things that we've taken for granted in nature.

That's what nature is screaming at us to come and figure out. When the system is out of balance, we no longer have all that nature can produce. In its own brilliance, the land has provided all of the tools for us to have incredible abundance on the output with less input.

We need to get into that cycle. We need to get back into that rotation. We've separated ourselves from it, and it is no longer serving us.

JA: It’s like the earth's respiratory system is out of balance, and we've got to help right the ship. In the summertime, at least in the northern hemisphere, the impact, from what I've read, is that when the leaves are out and everything's green in parts of the world, the levels of carbon in the atmosphere drop. But the problem is, this is not a healthy system; it’s broken down. And we’re seeing the impacts of climate change all around us. I wanted to put that out there to see what your thoughts are around it.

DL: I am glad that you brought up the topic of carbon levels, because I'm a little bit worried about the pervasive approach to climate change as being solely focused on sequestering carbon. Carbon is just one of the elements that must be addressed. Yes, we've focused on it because it’s easy to see and comprehend the negative impact of the accumulation of CO2, but it is one of many cycle centers that is in trouble in our landscape.

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I have recently been struck by the way that nature moves in cycles all around us. For instance, the cicadas that we saw this year that have emerged from their 17-year cycle are a very visual representation of a long-form cycle. Everyone knows, "Oh, it's coming, and there it is, and oh, my gosh. This is ridiculous.

There's so many bugs." Imagine what cycles we don't even see because of the time or scale that they're on. So in addition to these shorter-form cycles of carbon moving through at a seasonal or daily rate, we have to think about water cycles, nitrogen cycles, and so much more. What landscape-level cycles are happening over hundreds or thousands of years that we treat as a blip on our radar for the blink of an eye that we're on earth?

We've created a system fitting in productivity in a way that's expedient for capitalism to work well, and this has been one of the downfalls of modern agriculture. We have had a laser focus on annual yield, instead of where the roots of regeneration really come out of in indigenous thought, which very wisely looks at seven generations of impact, that every year is just another step in a much longer cycle. We must observe and listen to the land and allow what we're seeing to teach us, to give us clues about where we are, and to react responsibly and compassionately with what we're seeing coming out of those cycles. Every time we look up and we reflect for a moment on the phase of the moon, or where the tide is today, or how the winds have shifted due to the seasonal changes or the currents in the water, these are all invitations for us to jump back into these natural cycles in a way that is ingrained in our DNA, because we have coevolved alongside the breathing of this planet.

So let's be very careful about just focusing on just carbon. Or at least let's acknowledge that carbon might be a moment of triage that we need to address today and urgently. Let's not pretend that sequestering it, that putting it down deep into the ground and hoping it stays there, is what we're ultimately after. We need to go after a balanced system once again. And 58

that's going to take a lot more humility than I think we're currently approaching with some of these solutions.

JA: That is a great point, and I think we also hear the term sustainability being thrown around a lot. To me, what sustainability says is that it's about maintaining the status quo.

So I think in addition to promoting sustainability, we need to move beyond and strive for the land to end up in a better place after we’ve interacted with it. It's not about me forcing it to go in the direction I want it to be. It's about being the shepherd or the steward of that land, and then allowing nature to run the show. If we can do that, I think we can have a much more productive and much more balanced way of living.

DL: I love that notion, and I think what comes to mind is the idea of the tribe figure, which is the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. I would encourage people to reserve one of those slots for being in relationship with the environment. You don't have to have access to go out into an old growth forest or a jungle waterfall. It's not just about that. You can look up in the middle of New York City and see the moon cycle happening, or see the cicadas descending upon you, and you can be in relationship with nature at that moment. Just imagine having a friend like that. Someone that you have a deep relationship with, that is an endless fount of innovation. We mimic the folks that we look up to and that we seek to become and learn from.

What an opportunity, to be four people plus nature, because what can we learn from a knowledge source like that? And how is that going to make us better at our jobs, and better at being in relationship with our family, our community, and the land we live on?

I've come to start to define regenerative agriculture as relationship agriculture. I want folks to start to think of this term, not in just a set of discrete prescriptive practices like using natural fertilizer, but as an invitation to be in relationship with the farm, and that's what

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stewardship really is about. If we can start to come up with that vernacular and metaphors for describing this relationship, we are going to have such a rich journey on the way to these regenerative practices. We need the best creative minds in the world thinking about how to make the concept of our relationship with the environment a tangible thing. I'm really excited to continue to get a lot of fresh ideas about how we can accomplish this, and storytelling has been one of those ways, because we can feel something artistically, poetically, that is not just the data on a page.

We have relearned the value of support, so that when my barn burns down, my neighbors are going to come in to help me rebuild.

And if I have a crisis, there are people there for me. That's the shift that I see regenerative agriculture having, it’s bringing that community back into play, and being in equal balance, too. It’s the idea of, ”I need to work hard, but I also need to collaborate and work along with my neighbors and friends. It's not just me out there by myself." Nobody can have success in their life without other people helping them along the way.

JA: This really excites me. It's such an opportunity, because I think one thing that is missing in our culture right now is community.

COVID, in a way, woke a lot of people up to that. We were all laser focused on our jobs, carting our kids all over the place, and when we came home at night, there was very little thought on interacting with one’s community.

What's happening now is this recognition that when the option to interact with the community is taken away, we then are able to see its value in our lives.

DL: That's right, and I point to something that Zach talks about a lot, that cancer, which he spent so long studying, is essentially a cell that has forgotten how to be in community with the rest of its system. A cancer cell is just any other cell, but it doesn't perform its function in community anymore. You essentially have nonspecific multiplication of the cells that's just substance. I think there's a really important lesson there for us. We've seen cancer rates explode, and we need to extrapolate what is happening down at our cellular level, up through the

population, landscape, and planet. Nature is demanding that we be in community with it and with each other.

We're going to see, I think, really painful ramifications if we don't find our way back to that very essential skill that allowed us to be so successful as a species on this planet. If we can choose to understand it, there is incredible abundance at the other end of that road. It may start with not tilling your field or planting a cover crop, but it ends in community prosperity. It ends in more mutual understanding. It ends in prioritizing how we want to live and be in the world amongst each other. These are the happy consequences that spiral out of regenerative agriculture, and what agriculture can teach us.

I'm so inspired that the farmer is set to be a model of this hero's journey toward sustainable and regenerative practices that all of us are being asked to now go on. Those that are closest to the land, that have the highest capacity to perhaps be in relationship with that land, will lead us all to be in relationship with our place. And these places whisper at us.

They whisper all sorts of signals that I think guide us to where we want to be.

I’ll say one last thing in closing. And that is again a call-to-action for the design audience.

One of the pushes for transformation comes when we are facing existential threat. That's true in addiction, it can be true in a health crisis, and it's true for farmers. Many of the farmers who were the early adopters of regenerative practices did so because they were facing existential threats to their farms. They were going to lose the farm, or the farm was going to stop producing. The question is not, "Are we going to fix this?" The question is whether we want to be along for the ride going forward or not. That's something that we all need to humbly accept—if we want to be here, changes are going to have to happen. The world is going to go on without us, and it's going to be okay. So don't wait for the world. We need to choose to listen to the signals that are coming out right now, that's our challenge. We need folks who can design ways to amplify those signals. We

need designers who are going to translate it so that it lands with as many people as possible.

Beyond that, we must think about how to make this transition happen before the farmer is facing that existential threat. A job for all of us, and especially the design community, is how we are going to make this transition before we're in dire straits. We can avoid a whole lot of suffering if we can move more quickly. I think that's just a matter of landing and embodying some awareness. I hope that that's one of the things that touches readers, and I'm just very grateful to be able to share some thoughts with them through this conversation.

JA: David, thank you very much for your input, wisdom, and the work that you do. You're telling stories that people can relate to, and that’s crucial, because if we're just lecturing at people and telling them, "These are the steps we have to take," it's not going to land. It's the stories that resonate with us, because we can see ourselves in the story. When I got involved with the community in Farmer's Footprint, I met so many different people that have allowed me to start to see what my role can be in this work. Being in community with people, building those relationships, having conversations, and listening have all allowed me to check my preconceived biases and notions of how we can make a difference. This has enabled me to uncover the very thing that you've talked about here—it’s all about relationships. And that's the exciting piece of it, because that's within our control. • For more information about Farmer’s Footprint, please visit their website at farmersfootprint.us

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Looking into the Marshland from 'A Working Waterfront' by Niema Jafari, Xuefeng Du, and Kevin Gao 62

SUSTAINABILITY • SOCIAL IMPACT

Designs for Living with Rising Seas.

Students Envision an Adaptive Future

By Claire Martin, Project Manager, ReMain Nantucket Coastal communities are on the front lines of our generation’s most imminent threat: climate change. We see the impacts of this daily, even when the seas are calm and the sun is shining.

At a continuously increasing rate, coastal ecosystems are threatened by the acidification of the ocean, homes and dunescapes are lost to erosion, sedimentation and rising groundwater levels, and low-lying neighborhoods and wetlands are regularly inundated with water from high tides, storm surge, and sunny day flooding. By the mid-century, oceanside towns and cities around the world will likely be under several feet of water due to rising sea levels.

How does a community imagine a future with rising seas and regularly flooded buildings and roadways? Will neighborhoods retreat or adapt? What deserves to be protected or saved and who gets to make those decisions? How long will it take for policy on the local, state, and federal levels to catch up with innovative solutions that allow our communities to live with water?

Design, by nature, is a catalyst for change.

After all, human beings need to be able to envision and imagine something before they can begin to work toward it. In late 2019, ReMain Nantucket—an island-organization dedicated to strengthening the economic, social and environmental vitality of downtown Nantucket—set out to discover how design

might impact decisions and attitudes around coastal resilience. Could design reach across disciplines and allow coastal residents to consider the future impacts of climate change and rising seas with a hopeful lens? Could graduate students be a powerful vehicle for painting a picture of an adaptive Nantucket waterfront that inspires change?

Sunny day flooding, also known as nuisance flooding or high-tide flooding, continues to set records year after year, measured by data collected from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s 98 tide gauges set along the U.S. coastline. In July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its 2021 State of High Tide Flooding and Annual Outlook report. Hightide flooding in coastal communities in the U.S. continued to set records in 2020, a trend that experts expect will only continue.

Between May 2020 and April 2021, the number of sunny day flooding events across 14 coastal communities was the same or set a new record as the prior year. During that same time period, the number of high-tide flooding days was double what it was in the early 2000s. The report authors predict that by 2050, there will be 25 to 75 high-tide flooding days each year in U.S. coastal communities.1 Right as the Town of Nantucket officially adopted NOAA’s high scenario sea level rise projections for planning purposes in September of 2020, ReMain Nantucket had developed a IMAGE COURTESY OF YALE UNIVERSITY

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Northeastern student Ke-Ping (Cammy) Kuo’s concept for an integrated coastline protection and aquaculture structure

Rendering by Erika Blandon 64

IMAGES COURTESY OF NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY (TOP) AND THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA (BOTTOM)

model that would bring together the insights of local experts, the innovative thinking of graduate students, and the stories of people who call the island home. The model came to be called the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge,2 a spring 2021 virtual design studio led by Carolyn Cox of the University of Florida’s Florida Climate Institute. There were five participating universities: the University of Florida College of Design, Construction and Planning, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, University of Miami School of Architecture, the School of Architecture at Northeastern University, and the Yale School of Architecture.

The goal of the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge was to inspire the community to imagine a future that is adaptive in the face of sea level rise; to empower residents in coastal communities around the world to imagine rising water in a positive, even hopeful, way. Instead of being consumed by fear, the questions became, can we live productively and positively with rising sea levels? Can we adapt in ways that view increased water as an opportunity rather than a threat?

For coastal communities, including island communities like Nantucket, the data can be staggering. By 2050, an estimated 900 buildings on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard could see daily high-tide flooding.3 That’s according to The Trustees of Reservations 2021 State of the Coast report, which highlighted probabilities of extreme storm events under which Nantucket could see 69 miles of flooded roadway and 1,436 flooded structures in the event of a 10-year storm and 95 miles of flooded roadway and 1,932 flooded structures in the event of a 100-year storm. The report emphasized that vulnerable communities, like the islands off the coast of Massachusetts, have just 10 to 20 years before the impacts of a changing climate are lapping at the front door and the ability for the community to change and adapt is no longer viable.

Today, however, students who took part in the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge might not see those numbers as stagger-

ing. Where some typically saw disaster, these designers saw opportunity. Teams of students from leading design schools spent the spring semester collaborating to reimagine development and use along the Nantucket waterfront.

Guided by the leadership of advisory committee co-chairs Morris (Marty) Hylton III—historic architect for climate change adaptation for the National Park Service—and Robert Miklos—founding principal of designLAB architects—the teams took an iterative, designdriven approach focused on three study areas along the harbor: • Low-lying Brant Point neighborhood, which was built on wetlands and is thus one of the most vulnerable to increased storm-related and sunny day flooding.

• The island’s historic downtown with ports for the only two ferry terminals offering service to the mainland.

• Washington Street, which is the main artery for traffic in and out of downtown Nantucket and the only corridor large enough for trucks carrying fuel and food to access the rest of the island.

By April, the students—who were working across as many as 14 time zones and had not yet stepped foot on the island because of the Covid-19 pandemic—had pioneered a diverse array of adaptive designs for not just protecting, but enhancing the island’s infrastructure, coastline, neighborhoods, and public spaces against the impacts of sea level rise.

“I think one of the real benefits of the Challenge is that no one expects students to solve the problem,” said lead professor Jeff Carney, associate professor, School of Architecture, University of Florida. “They’re learning. So we’re freed from that responsibility, but at the same time we have a real opportunity to provoke the conversation around the issues of climate change. It’s really exciting for me to see communities rise to that opportunity.”

Proposals for an adaptive Nantucket4 included buoyant foundations for private res-

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN

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idences, a flood-resilient town square, and green energy systems to replace existing grey infrastructure. Students proposed landscapes serving as retention basins, artificial reefs to curb storm surge and aid sand movement, permeable surfaces along major streets, and areas restored to natural sanctuaries. Several groups imagined new economies fueled by ecotourism and aquaculture.

Instead of being consumed by fear, the questions became, can we live productively and positively with rising sea levels? Can we adapt in ways that view increased water as an opportunity rather than a threat? “[This Challenge] is a brilliant use of academia,” said Professor Anne Tate of the Rhode Island School of Design during an internal jury review of student work in April. “People don't know how to move forward if they can't see where they're going. Providing this plethora of visions and solutions, all packaged together in this very forward-looking and optimistic way, is an absolutely tremendous gift to Nantucket and to the public officials who are going to have to figure out how to move forward.”

So how does a community begin to imagine a future under rising sea levels? Did we decide what deserves to be saved and who will make those decisions? Can the work of the students influence leaders and constituents to inform policy and regulations?

These are big questions to tackle. And they certainly can't begin to be tackled without first identifying the unique makeup of a town, the value systems of the community, and the livelihoods and ways of life of its inhabitants. But through the remarkable design work of the students, Nantucket as a community can envision a future that is wetter, but no less beautiful.

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Rendering by Alexander Boucher IMAGE COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

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Images created by Camila Zablah, Paula Christina Viala, Thomas Long, and Tanner Wall

'Sea-hive' Breakwater • Acts as a breakwater, strategically placed offshore of BrantPoint to dampen wave intensity • Tied to economic revitalization through development of oyster bed creeks • Biophilic material forming a natural protection

Pocket Parks • Relocate housing to create additional green spaces • Promote social cohesion and resilience

3D Printed Receptors • Act as a host to promote and expand natural plant and wildlife systems • Helps restore and protect native and resilient salt marshes

Brant Point: House Islands Floating house islands elevated on mounds to divert water away from the residential structure

Downtown: Extended Wharfs Expands the existing wharves, accommodating additional structures for residential and/ or commercial purposes

Washington Street: Stilted Villiage The Fisherman Community creates a vibrant neighborhood of affordable homes of medium high density on stilts, allowing residents to live with water

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IMAGES COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI

Crescent Fencing

Coastal Fencing

Wood Piling

Breakwaters

Submerged Breakwaters

Images created by Casale Ulloa

The diversity, the thoughtfulness, and the integrity of the student presentations far exceeded all expectations in inspiring the ReMain Nantucket team and the advisors to look differently at issues of resilience and to perhaps take on these challenges with renewed strength. On June 2, the community of Nantucket gathered outdoors for a public presentation to learn from the five university teams and discuss how, in unison with coastal communities worldwide, we might learn to live with water.

“There's something pretty magical about a community being able to bring together all of these students and academic professionals,” said Paula Christina Viala, a participating student on the University of Miami team. “That meaningful community engagement was a big takeaway of the Challenge for me. A lot of beautiful things can come out of that.”

Forums, exhibitions, and conversations like those that the Envision Resilience Nantucket Challenge continues to foster are essential in moving coastal communities forward in the face of sea level rise and the impacts of climate change. The hope through this Challenge is that beyond the island of Nantucket, coastal towns and cities around the world are also inspired by the innovative and adaptive proposals of the students to be creative and bold in envisioning a resilient future. •

ReMain Nantucket and ReMain Ventures are funded by Wendy Schmidt and her husband Eric to support the economic, social, and environmental vitality of the island of Nantucket.

In addition to providing grants and sponsorships to support sustainable and cultural initiatives across the island, ReMain Nantucket has worked in conjunction with ReMain Ventures to revitalize the downtown district year-round through the preservation of historic buildings that are home to a mix of nonprofit and commercial businesses.

For more information, visit envisionresilience.org

1.

https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/publications/2021_ State_of_High_Tide_Flooding_and_Annual_Outlook_ Final.pdf

2.

https://www.envisionresilience.org

3.

https://static1.squarespace.com/ static/5ce308a7514487000112e19b/t/610729cb 96cbc243b9e38fdb/1627859414380/SOC_2021_ IslandsReport_Web.pdf

4.

https://www.envisionresilience.org/meet-the-teams

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN

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ENTREPRENEURSHIP • SUSTAINABILITY

Creativity Under Constraint with SXD. A Zero Waste Design-Tech Startup

By Shelly Xu, Founder of SXD Our clothing, our second skin, is one of the biggest polluters on our planet.

The global apparel industry produces about 92 million tons of textile waste a year.1 That is about one garbage truck’s worth of fabric waste getting landfilled or burned every second, according to a 2017 report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.2 I have seen my own childhood playground in Asia turn into a textile dumpster. The apparel industry is also notorious for unethical labor practices, and in Bangladesh, one of the top clothing manufacturers on earth, climate change is estimated to displace one in every seven people by 2050, many of them seamstresses.3

No matter how sustainable a piece of clothing is, if it’s not bought, worn, and loved by the wearer, it’s simply more waste.

From organic cotton to recycling, increasingly more brands are seeking sustainable and ethical solutions. However, today’s sustainable fashion is an unpopular compromise. Sustainable clothing often costs more but doesn’t look better. Which is why only an insignificant fraction of people are actually buying sustainable fashion for their closets. When our

team at Shelly Xu Design (SXD) began exploring this problem, we surveyed over 2000 people, and we learned that today’s sustainable fashion too often felt like a costly replica of existing basics—an uninspiring guilt trip that doesn’t feel worth it.

No matter how sustainable a piece of clothing is, if it’s not bought, worn, and loved by the wearer, it’s simply more waste.

To drive scaled adoption in sustainable fashion is to shift human behaviors. Just like how Tesla attracts even the non-environmentalists with their well designed cars, design will be a powerful tool for building desire and shifting behaviors in the apparel industry.

Design Journey My design journey began when I was just two years old. My earliest memory was sitting on a refrigerator while dining with my parents in a 70 sq ft home. We could only fit one table or one bed at a time, so we rearranged furniture to make daily life work. That was how I learned about creativity under constraints—discovering what's possible with limited resources.

This concept fuels me and SXD’s zero waste designs. Today, fashion designs often start on a sketchbook or a drawing pad. The unconstrained artistic vision comes first. The fabric material is then cut to fit the shape of the vision. This process wastes 10-30% of the fabric and demands new fabric orders without addressing accumulated old fabric. On the IMAGE COURTESY OF SHELLY XU

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other hand, SXD’s zero waste designs maximize desirability while acknowledging the limited resources on our planet, using leftover fabrics and not wasting anything, and designing within the boundaries of the existing fabric dimensions.

Solution Building and Team Building When I first began SXD, I tested desirability by starting an anonymous Instagram account and uploading zero waste design illustrations without actually revealing that the designs were zero waste. This allowed me to test whether or not people would find the product appealing even without the sustainability label. Shortly after opening this account, over 10,000 users began following the designs.

I then tested if the aesthetic was good enough to not only attract engagement but also conversion. I translated the most popular illustrations into real zero waste clothing, and 72

IMAGES COURTESY OF SHELLY XU

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sold them through Instagram for $300 each.

I deliberately made the price high enough to ensure that the purchaser truly loved the design—it was not just a purchase out of kindness to support a new designer. At the same time, I also ensured that the price was low enough to still be accessible to many people, as the average US household spending on clothing is $1000-$2000 per year. When these zero waste clothing prototypes consistently sold out, I realized that we were getting closer to desirability.

Desirability in design is not only about creating aesthetic pieces, but also about creating accessibility and function.

Accessibility means designs that cost less rather than more to produce and scale. While many sustainable methods in fashion—from textile innovation to artisan work—add to the cost, zero waste designs have the potential to save cost by reducing fabric consumption. This 74

IMAGE COURTESY OF SHELLY XU

can have a massive impact, as fabric is often the number one or two biggest cost that goes into apparel production.

Desirability in design is not only about creating aesthetic pieces, but also about creating accessibility and function.

Minimizing cost requires a combination of design and technology. Today, fashion designers are often far removed from engineers, so no creative designer is truly factoring in manufacturing efficiency. This is why sustainability efforts so far have been incremental rather than fundamental, and tend to add cost rather than subtract. For SXD, we built a team that combined design and engineering from step

PHOTOS BY JAMES CHEONG (TOP) • PHOTO BY JOE THOMAS (BOTTOM)

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PHOTOS BY STEPHANIE CHEONG (TOP) • PHOTO BY JAMES CHEONG (BOTTOM)

one, so our products are inherently efficient and easy to scale. We also deliberately design timeless garments with pockets that adapt to changing bodies. These versatile designs are more appealing to the modern customer who needs not only fashion but also function.

Combining design and engineering early on allowed our team to create highly efficient apparel that saves about 55% in production cost. We achieve this through minimal cuts, minimal fabric consumption, and zero fabric waste.

Developing our team also expanded my perspective around the ethics of apparel creation.

Even before starting SXD, I already knew about unethical labor practices in the fashion industry, but I did not know the magnitude of it and how much unethical manufacturing practices and climate change are linked. Diving into the people behind the clothing taught me that the biggest manufacturing countries are also the worst hit by climate change. For example, in Bangladesh— one of the biggest clothing manufacturers in the world—textile waste is taking over, and by 2050, climate change will displace ~20 million people4 in the country. Understanding this pushed me to rethink my production model. I shifted SXD from a US-only to a global lens. I started learning more about climate refugees and onboarded Ahmed Fardin, a Bangladeshi engineer from Cambridge University who also researched zero waste design. Together, we began forming a network of climate refugees, paid them ~4x the local wage, and trained them to create zero waste clothing. We also worked with the nonprofit Youth Worldwide Foundation, which provides refugee skills training and hygiene support. As we incorporate automation to scale zero waste designs, we will be automating the most tedious parts for climate refugees rather than taking away jobs. This includes automating sampling, cutting and packaging.

Understanding the refugees’ stories has also changed my design. I deliberately create minimal designs that are unisex, one-size-fits-all, and simple in cuts so that we can hire even the newly trained climate refugees.

Impact So far, SXD’s prototypes alone have led to enough fabric “unwasted” to hang from a skyscraper’s 60th floor, over 240K liters of water saved (by upcycling rather than dying any fabric), and over 1 million interactions with our open source zero waste designs. Most of these interactions come from aspiring designers seeking a new way of creating clothing. We have also sold out prototypes with a growing waitlist, and have been invited to all major fashion weeks around the world.

But we are even more excited about the path ahead.

Just dropping products alone will not shift the multi-trillion dollar fashion industry. Once we have proven that we can produce solid zero waste designs that are sustainable, ethical and desirable, we will plug our work into other brands to broaden our influence. We are currently working on two partnership projects, turning best sellers of global apparel brands into zero waste clothing. We are also investing in technology that can automate zero waste designs to adapt to various brand styles at scale.

The apparel industry produces approximately 92 million tons of textile waste a year. Our mission is to make this number zero. •

1.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200710-whyclothes-are-so-hard-to-recycle

2.

https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/news/onegarbage-truck-of-textiles-wasted-every-second-reportcreates-vision-for-change

3.

https://ejfoundation.org/reports/climate-displacementin-bangladesh

4.

https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/bangladesh-countryunderwater-culture-move

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GLOBAL TEMPERATURE CHANGE (1850-2020)

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1890

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2010

Changes in global average temperature from 1850 to 2020 by Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at the University of Reading, UK. “The planet is warming due to human activities, primarily burning fossil fuels and deforestation.”

See www.ShowYourStripes.info for details.

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CIVIC INNOVATION • SUSTAINABILITY

How to Meet Your Climate Responsibility.

Design gas out of your life. Then design it out of your town.

By Lisa Cunningham and Jesse Gray Your story may be very similar to ours. Like us, you are probably already worried about climate change. You’ve noticed that dire news of our rapidly warming earth is no longer just from distant parts, affecting people and places we see only in photos.

Extreme heat1 has come to our own backyards.2 Massive fires have hit those we know and love.

The same with extreme storms and flooding.

The news is no longer just about starving polar bears, retreating glaciers, and collapsing ice sheets. It’s about tipping points, an increasingly hot planet,3 with greenhouse gas concentrations hitting record highs4 and destined only to go higher.5 Two of the most conservative organizations—the International Energy Agency6 and the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)7—have recently issued the same stark warning: in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, we must stop using fossil fuels immediately.

As we write, record breaking heat,8 drought, fires, and smoke are being felt all over the United States. But let’s be very clear—our climate crisis doesn’t affect everyone equally. It disproportionately affects those most at risk9 who suffer at the expense of our wasteful policies, with higher temperatures and a lack of clean air and clean water, resulting in significantly worse health outcomes and opportunities. It disproportionately affects those in sac-

rifice zones10 living in the shadow of toxic oil and gas operations, workers unable to escape this extreme heat,11 12 as well as those living in tropical climates and flood-prone areas, causing mass migration13 and upheaval across the world. Due to racism and economic inequality, these burdens fall disproportionately on Black and brown and low-income people all over the world, including here in the United States.

One of us, Jesse, was born at 332 parts per million (PPM) CO2. In 2017, he awoke from climate denial and made it his hobby to design gas out of his life. For what it’s worth, Jesse is a neurogenomicist by day who did not contest the science of global warming. Rather, his denial was the denial that arises in all of us when we mean well but can’t quite figure out what to do to help. He had despaired every time he filled up his gas tank, but he hadn’t known what to do differently.

For the other of us, Lisa, an architect and designer, born at 315 parts per million CO2, “energy efficiency” used to be the mantra. Gas was better than oil—or that was the well-accepted story—more insulation was better than less, and creating an airtight building was good enough. At a certain point, she awoke and realized that “efficiency,” while critical, was not going to get us to where we need to go, because we can’t “efficiency” our way to zero emissions. Even an “efficient” gas furnace still produces 100% greenhouse gas emissions for decades, emissions that we can no longer IMAGE COURTESY OF ED HAWKINS

79

The authors, Lisa Cunningham and Jesse Gray, with students and colleagues upon passage of Brookline’s first building electrification bylaw.

afford any of, not in the future and not now.

The same with our internal combustion vehicles, no matter if they are sippers or guzzlers.

Efficiency alone won’t get us to where we need to go fast enough.

Now at 419 PPM CO2,14 we have come to a personal reckoning, as an architect, a scientist, and as frustrated climate activists. We realized that the actions that we had been taking, while more than what most people do even now, were not enough. Prior to the reckoning, we had worked on climate committees, voted the Democratic ticket,15 attended rallies, and bought 100% green, renewable electricity. At the same time, we were also driving cars that still used gasoline and burning methane16 by using multiple gas appliances inside our own homes.

In fairness to Jesse, Lisa, and all of us, it wasn’t until the past few years that it became truly practical to take significant personal action on climate. Most of us haven’t yet fully absorbed this new information, and there is a reason why. The oil and gas industry, who have been in a decades-long denial and cover up17 of the severe consequences of climate change, and 80

continue to actively undercut climate action,18 don't want you to know this. The mainstream media19 hasn’t been helping, either.

We knew that fossil fuels—gas, oil, methane and in fact all “combustion” fuels—were killing us,20 producing emissions that are incompatible with the future of life as we know it.21 But we now know that we don’t need them. We have come to understand that gas is not the “clean” fuel that the oil and gas industry have been promoting and glamorizing. We have learned that gas is as polluting as coal, emitting methane,22 a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon, from leaky pipelines and old gas infrastructure,23 and from burning and leaks from wells, not to mention the devastating effects of gas extraction from fracking.24 The good news is that life—and design— is actually better without gas and other fossil fuels. It’s not a sacrifice. Not only is all-electric technology necessary to reduce our carbon emissions, eliminating combustion25 (from ALL sources, including wood and biomass) produces cleaner air and significantly improved health outcomes. The technology is here, we just need to embrace it.26 And as in all tech-

nological advances—think computer and cellphone technology—embracing this change is not just a scientific and moral imperative, but will also spur job creation and promote enormous economic opportunity.

Everyday Options for Environmentally Friendly Alternatives If you drive a car, it’s much nicer—and a lot more fun—to drive an electric vehicle.27 You can pre-heat and pre-cool from your phone— even in a closed garage, without the risk of death by asphyxiation! You don’t have to make a special trip to get gas. Instead, you leave every morning with a full charge. For those without a charger where they live, which is many of us, public charging stations make electric car ownership practical for condo owners and renters. And for those who care about performance, electric motors respond instantly, providing full torque from a standstill and rivaling even the sportiest of conventional gas-combustion vehicles.

Even as we switch to all-electric vehicles, we can be healthier and reduce our emissions even faster by advocating for, and using if possible, public transit. EV technology is also being adopted for school buses, public transit, and pub-

lic works vehicles, which will lead to cleaner air and eventually zero emissions in these sectors.

Life is healthier and more comfortable at home without gas, too. Heat pumps—we are not talking the old resistance heat of decades ago—provide more comfort than fossil fuel combustion furnaces, supply both heating and cooling in the same system, and operate with high efficiency, even in cold climates like New England. Induction ranges have the power to boil water almost twice as fast and heat more evenly than gas, and are in widespread use throughout Europe and the rest of the world.

All this without spewing dangerous pollutants like carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and formaldehyde into your home,28 and significantly increasing your children’s risk of asthma and other harmful health effects, which can’t be said of your gas stove.

In short, it makes sense to design fossil fuels out of our lives and work, starting now. There is a lot of work to be done. The bar will keep going up. Yesterday it was hybrids, but today it’s electric vehicles. Yesterday it was converting from oil to gas, but today it’s converting from gas to electric. Tomorrow, we will begin to dismantle the gas grid.

Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2) and Methane (CH4) levels, 1800–present CO2 and CH4 atmospheric dry molar fraction (ppmv), averaged over a calendar year ppmv

ppmv

Jesse's Birthdate

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Lisa's Birthdate 350 325 300

3.0

275

2.0 1.0

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CO2 (MAUNA LOA)

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CH4 (ICE CORES)

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CH24 (MAUNA LOA)

GRAPH SOURCE: WWW.SEALEVEL.INFO/CO2_AND_CH4.HTML

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The apparent magnitude of what needs to be done exhausts the human psyche, and it’s one reason we haven’t acted faster—we don’t know how to start. But instead of thinking of reasons why we can’t do something, we need to start thinking of why we can.29 We can’t wait for perfect solutions, or solutions that don’t require us to do anything, or solutions that everyone, including the oil and gas industry, can agree to. We need to inject climate, as a priority, into absolutely every aspect of our lives, right now.30 Our car purchases, our home improvement projects, our daily conversations, our design efforts, and our messaging.31 It helps to keep it simple, and focus on what’s most impactful. Here’s simple: get rid of gas.

Start by designing gas out of your life. It’s easier than you think. Start with your appliances: your cooktop or range, your water heater, your clothes dryer. Replace your car, or ditch it altogether, and when you can, your furnace as well. Never go to a gas station or to get an oil change again. Get a free home energy audit,32 replace your lightbulbs, and sign up for 100% renewable energy.33 For extra credit—and to add money into your bank account—install solar panels on your roof or condo building if

feasible, further reducing your energy needs while taking full advantage of federal34 and state35 subsidies. Design gas out.

But this isn’t just about individual choices.

That is just a first step, and not an option for many of us. However, those of us that can make these changes need to do so, and as quickly as possible. Consumer demand creates more demand, changes false perceptions fueled by oil and gas industry lobbying,36 and leads to lower costs and more innovation,37eventually benefiting everyone, even those who are not able to take these first steps.

This is also about creating a movement, and to do that, we need everyone on board. Yes, you.

A movement takes more than tweets, posts, protests, and personal action. In order to do what needs to be done, no one can afford to stay on the sidelines any more. Individual actions need to be backed up by the power of activism, and those of us who have the privilege of time and money must participate to the fullest. For systemic change, we need laws at all levels of government to support our actions.38 So, if you’re feeling ambitious, and we know you are, take the next step and design it into law. Right now, local law is the law that is hard-

Zero Emissions Needed by at least 2040 50

A Global Carbon Budget of 340 GtCO2 gives a 67% probability of meeting the 1.5°C warming target.

Peak emissions in 2020

Global CO2 Emissions (Gt CO2)

40

65% reduction by 2030

30

20

10

600

340

ZERO emissions by 2040

A Global Carbon Budget of 600 GtCO2 results in less than a 50% probability of meeting the UN IPCC 1.5°C warming target.

GtCO2

GtCO2

2020 82

2025

2030

2035

GRAPH SOURCE: ARCHITECTURE 2030 AND IPCC SR15, TABLE 2.2

2040

2045

2050

ELECTRIC VEHICLES

The most important climate action many of us can take right now is to resolve to never again buy a gasoline vehicle. Transport is one of our biggest daily climate impacts—at about 30% of US emissions—and it's also one of the easiest and most pleasurable impacts to reduce. Resolving not to buy another gasoline vehicle has never been more practical.

If you drive, it's easier than you think to go fully electric. It's not only an upgrade, but also the total cost of ownership is also lower for electric vehicles, since maintenance and fueling are typically far less expensive. With state rebates and federal tax credits, many electric cars can also be relatively inexpensive upfront to obtain.

In Massachusetts as of this writing, you can buy the Hyundai Kona, far greener than a Prius, for less than $25,000, nearly half of the average price of a new vehicle; or you can lease it for $265 a month. A base model Tesla Model 3 can be purchased for $550 a month or leased for $390. [Kona pricing net $7500 in federal incentives (no longer available for GM or Tesla) and $2500 in MA state incentives.]

While you might think you need unlimited range (which isn't possible in a combustion vehicle either), it's plenty practical and pleasurable instead to stop for 15-20 minutes to stretch your legs, gaining a hundred miles of range at a level 3 charger while on a bathroom break, coffee break, or grocery run. Talk to an EV owner—once you’ve gone electric you can never go back!

References fueleconomy.gov/feg/taxevb.shtml evcharging.enelx.com/resources/ federal-and-state-electric-vehicle-incentives

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INDUCTION COOKING

Induction cooking uses a magnetic field to heat up cookware and efficiently cook food without losing heat to surrounding areas or emitting harmful gases such as formaldehyde, nitrous oxide, and carbon monoxide, thus making it more efficient and safer. It is faster (water boils almost twice as fast) and more finely tuned (you can melt chocolate without a double boiler). Because there is no combustible gas, the risk of kitchen fires and explosions is greatly reduced. Cleaning a flat glass surface is easier. In widespread use all over the world, US consumers have been late to embrace this clean and healthy technology, in part due to oil and gas industry propaganda. Still, many top chefs and hotel restaurants in the US use induction. In our anecdotal experience, cooking with induction is a lot like driving an electric vehicle—once you try it, you will be hooked.

Induction stoves are available as plug-in hotplates, cooktops, and ranges. Getting a new cooktop or range can be expensive if you aren’t already overhauling your kitchen, particularly because induction ranges typically require electrical outlets that may not be running to your stove already. A great alternative is a portable induction cooktop; including the cost of new magnetic pans, this can cost less than $150 all-in.

References rmi.org/insight/gas-stoves-pollution-health www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/opinion/climate-change-gas-electricity.html www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/fight-over-natural-gas-stovesare-wedge-issue-on-the-media

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est for the fossil fuel and dark money interests to fight. Local law is the law that can be written by volunteer citizens not beholden to fossil fuel interests. Local law bends first to our will, as the first record of a new political consensus.

What do we mean by this? Beginning in 2019, a new local law in California banning gas in new buildings spread from Berkeley to San Jose, soon Sacramento, and then to almost 50 towns and cities in CA.39 This law denies building permits for projects that would install gas systems during new construction. It protects you, as a property owner or renter, from builders, architects, and landlords who are wasting your time and money by installing systems that actually have to be replaced so that we can meet our climate targets. This new law is a practical step, as well as a fiscally conservative one.

The law leapt from California to the Boston suburb of Brookline, MA, where we copied Berkeley and took it further, in spite of our cold weather climate. Our legislation40 prohibited fossil fuel systems not only in new construction, but also in gut renovations. We also added practical exemptions and a waiver process, to ensure that our bylaw could be easily implemented. This legislation passed overwhelmingly in Brookline because we convinced our Town Meeting that fossil fuel free construction is both practical and cost-effective, particularly at the point when systems are being replaced or installed. Just as importantly, it makes no fiscal or moral sense to install new fossil fuel systems that are designed to last for 30 years or more, well past the point when we know we must be carbon free.

After we passed our bylaw, we had many towns and cities contact us to say that they wanted to follow in our footsteps and pass similar legislation. This interest led to the launch of a statewide building electrification movement, a movement that has grown and spread throughout the state and beyond as many municipalities recognize the practicality, the urgency, and the fiscally prudent path of pursuing net-zero41 and fossil fuel free construction.42 With the Brookline by-law in mind, the Massachusetts state legislature, with recent

climate legislation,43 opened the door a crack.

Backed by the knowledge that municipalities all over the State are clamoring for action,44 our state legislators even stood firm when the governor twice balked and tried to veto the critical building electrification components of this legislation. This is progress.

And yet, the progress is not fast enough or certain enough, and it is still no more than studies and talk. In Massachusetts, National Grid and Eversource are in sync with national oil and gas industry talking points45 and just formed a regional gas-promoting cabal called the "Consortium to Combat Electrification."46 Governor Baker set an important goal, including decarbonizing one million existing Massachusetts buildings in the next nine years and 300-400 million square feet of commercial real estate,47 but there is no plan48 or political path to make that happen. Instead, we are building new buildings every day with fossil fuel systems that will need to be replaced well before their useful lives are up, at far greater cost.

Our first Brookline by-law was struck down during legal review by the Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. While expressing full support for our policy goals,49 she ruled that we had run afoul of competing legal priorities legislated long ago, including a right for utilities to sell gas. These are not the priorities we should have, but unlike California, it is the state law that we do have.

Undeterred, we have continued to press ahead to find other legal mechanisms to circumvent these outdated and counter-productive legacy laws. In December 2020, we passed a Home Rule Petition asking the State Legislature to allow our 2019 bylaw. A mere six months later, four other Massachusetts towns had already followed suit, with more municipalities in the pipeline.50 Most recently, in early June 2021, we took yet a further step here in Brookline, taking another shot-on-goal with a new by-law. It does not ban gas, but it creates a strong disincentive to build with gas. It applies only to projects that require zoning relief, which is a lot of projects in our town. Still subject to 85

review by the Attorney General, this legislation51 sends a clear signal: if the state can’t get started, then municipalities, beginning with Brookline, will drag it kicking and screaming into the future.

This is already a story about the power of grassroots local assertiveness. Our local action, even with legal setbacks, has spurred both more local and statewide action. And state action spurs federal action.

Now we are asking for your help. Take a step yourself, in your own life, toward getting rid of gas, and then go one step further: get others to do so as well. If you are a designer, an architect, or a planner, then you are both a communicator and a problem solver, and you wield a lot of power. Use that power. Be a Clean Creative.52 Counter the lies and the misinformation, design your projects53 and your life without fossil fuels. Communicate the urgency of this problem, join one of the many groups that are fighting for change. Start with your own community and act as though your life—and your children’s lives—depend on it.

Because it really does.54 Then, identify local legislation that could be impactful, practical, and politically possible in your community, wherever you are. We can help. We weren’t experts, and you don’t have to be either. Join or form a team of committed volunteers. Connect with allies. Meet the local power brokers. Draft an ordinance or by-law.

Incorporate feedback. Get it passed. Does your community have a community choice electricity program? If not, start one. Are your schools and municipal buildings being built to netzero standards? If not, make sure they are.

Electrify your municipal fleet and clean your community’s air while protecting our children all at the same time. In every community that has done this—and there are too many to count—an individual just like you was the catalyst for these actions. Be that person.

We all need to change, and to convince others to change. Join us, and you may find, as we did, that there are rewards not only in changing the minds of others, but also in changing ourselves. • 86

WE NEED MORE THAN TWEETS AND LIKES Get involved and join those working for change. Contact: 1. Your town/city climate action committees (often there are several—some are connected to local government, others are citizen run).

2. Most of the state/national organizations listed below have local town and city chapters.

3. Climate activists need more political power. Become a Town Meeting member (as we did) or run for City Council or higher office.

Some state and national organizations. These are a few ideas, but there are many, and many more who need both your financial contributions as well as your time and advocacy: • 350.org • Sunrise movement sunrisemovement.org • Environmental Voter Project environmentalvoter.org • RMI rmi.org • Mothers Out Front mothersoutfront.org • Elders Climate Action eldersclimateaction.org • Climate Xchange climate-xchange.org/network • Extinction Rebellion rebellion.global • Sierra Club sierraclub.org

You can contact us at zerocarbonma@gmail.com

1.

www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/06/16/heatwave-west-record-temperatures/

2.

www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/climate/heatwave-weatherhot.html

3.

www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2& ccid=hD3USZ9t&id=7BFD2CA6AF572C0864D5564483 A9DF9AA16E6091&thid=OIP.hD3USZ9tNZpfBhaoIYMpp wHaEK&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fmedia1.s-nbcnews. com%2fj%2fnewscms%2f2019_06%2f2743746%2f190 206-global-heat-map-nasa-2018-gif-cs-1106a_29461617 254943fcc519cbd6710e1fd5.nbcnews-fp-1200-630.gif& cdnurl=https%3a%2f%2fth.bing.com%2fth%2fid%2fR8 43dd4499f6d359a5f0616a8218329a7%3frik%3dkWBuo ZrfqYNEVg%26pid%3dImgRaw&exph=585&expw=1040 &q=nasa+photos+of+warming+planet&simid=6080305 31565191685&ck=C7888EA6E4CC82486E9362AA0F09 6CE9&selectedIndex=0&idpp=overlayview&ajaxhist=0& ajaxserp=0

4.

thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/

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www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/1004097672/ carbon-dioxide-which-drives-climate-change-reacheshighest-level-in-4-million-years

6.

www.nytimes.com/2021/05/18/climate/climate-changeemissions-IEA.html

7.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/climatechange-dangerous-thresholds-un-report

8.

​​ https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/50million-americans-under-warnings-as-heat-wavesmashes-records-in-the-west-fuels-dangerous-wildfires/ ar-AAL5m13?ocid=undefined

9.

www.niehs.nih.gov/health/materials/climate_and_human_ health_508.pdf

10. grist.org/fix/americans-live-sacrifice-zones-letsfix-that/#:~:text=Black%2520and%2520brown%2520 people%2520also%2520make%2520up%2520the,on% 2520an%2520even%2520darker%2520meaning%2520 during%2520the%2520pandemic.

24. www.psr.org/blog/resource/fracking-compendium/ 25. www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/gas-biomass/ 26. www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/opinion/ climate-change-electricity-fossil-fuels. html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article 27. www.hsph.harvard.edu/electric-cars/ 28. rmi.org/insight/gas-stoves-pollution-health 29. heated.world/p/what-can-i-do-anything 30. www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/notime-to-waste/ 31. fossilfree.media/#blog 32. www.masssave.com/ 33. www.epa.gov/greenpower/community-choice-aggregation 34. www.energy.gov/eere/solar/homeowners-guide-federal-taxcredit-solar-photovoltaics 35. www.dsireusa.org/ 36. www.facebook.com/watch/?v=915740298972039 37. ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewablesgrowth?campaign_id=116&emc=edit_ pk_20210817&instance_id=38115&nl=paul-krugman&regi_ id=23409218&segment_id=66468&te=1&user_ id=06f382b4308003f3dcb8fc5289ff872b 38. www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/opinion/climate-changecarbon-neutral.html?campaign_id=39&emc=edit_ ty_20210831&instance_id=39239&nl=opiniontoday&regi_id=23409218&segment_id=67679&te=1&user_ id=06f382b4308003f3dcb8fc5289ff872b 39. www.sierraclub.org/articles/2021/07/californias-citieslead-way-gas-free-future 40. www.brooklinema.gov/DocumentCenter/View/20839/ ARTICLE-21-as-voted-per-Town-Clerk?bidId= 41. builtenvironmentplus.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/ MAisReadyforNetZero_03.01.21.pdf

11. www.washingtonpost.com/national/heat-wave-westcoast/2021/06/19/da028a60-d14c-11eb-80142f3926ca24d9_story.html

42. rmi.org/insight/the-new-economics-of-electrifyingbuildings/

12. www.nytimes.com/2021/07/15/climate/heat-injuries.html

43. www.wbur.org/earthwhile/2021/03/26/new-mass-climatelaw-faq

13. www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/07/19/guatemalaimmigration-climate-change-499281 14. www.sealevel.info/co2_and_ch4.html 15. www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/opinion/climate-changecongress.html 16. www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/climate/methane-leaksunited-nations.html 17. www.theguardian.com/business/2016/may/20/oilcompany-records-exxon-co2-emission-reduction-patents 18. www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/climate/exxongreenpeace-lobbyist-video.html 19. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun /03/media-climate-change-crisis-emergency?utm_ campaign=Carbon%2520Brief%2520Daily%2520 Briefing&utm_content=20210604&utm_medium=email& utm_source=Revue%2520Daily&utm_source=Energy+ News+Network+daily+email+digests&utm_campaign= 9d10cd90a4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_05_11_11_46_ COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_724b1f01f5 -9d10cd90a4-89304872 20. www.hsph.harvard.edu/c-change/news/fossil-fuel-airpollution-responsible-for-1-in-5-deaths-worldwide/ 21. www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/23/climatechange-dangerous-thresholds-un-report 22. www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/methane 23. rmi.org/a-new-approach-to-americas-rapidly-aging-gasinfrastructure/

44. docs.google.com/document/d/1NPqPOnF1oTdZ5YWtb IPVSFzautS-A7L1KcFIv0MP-Pk/edit 45. www.fastcompany.com/90621117/the-oil-and-gas-industryis-in-denial-about-its-own-demise 46. www.enn.com/articles/67740-a-leading-us-utility-stealthilyfights-the-electrification-of-heating-systems 47. www.mass.gov/doc/interim-clean-energy-and-climate-planfor-2030-december-30-2020/download 48. www.bostonglobe.com/2021/08/21/science/ massachusetts-should-be-converting-100000homes-year-electric-heat-actual-number-461/?s_ campaign=breakingnews:newsletter 49. www.boston.com/news/local-news/2020/07/22/maurahealey-brookline-oil-gas-ban-ruling/ 50. www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/newsinsights/latest-news-headlines/mass-climate-actadvances-movement-to-restrict-natural-gas-use-inbuildings-63403916 51. blogs.law.columbia.edu/climatechange/2021/05/28/ emerging-local-legal-pathways-for-building-electrificationair-pollution-and-land-use-regulation-in-new-york-citybrookline-massachusetts/ 52. cleancreatives.org/about 53. www.aia.org/resources/202041-the-2030-commitment 54. www.nytimes.com/2021/08/19/opinion/climate-un-reportgreta-thunberg.html

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