The Upcycle—We need to concern more about future

Recently, I am reading the book “The Upcycle”, written by Michael Braungart. In chapter five, the center point, which impresses me a lot, is that we can always be thinking not only how we can design for a healthy present but also how we can return our common property, our common inheritance.

We need to concern about future generation. Michael Braungart listed several instances to support his point. Because of the gusto of people, sturgeon, which provides the caviar was listed as an endangered species; because of too many grazing cows which led a deficit of green grass, the cow owner in medieval Europe destroyed everyone else’s potential benefit including his own; because of the great amount of oyster, the ocean acidification of certain area increased.

Since long time ago, in order to achieve more sophisticated technology, higher level civilization, human beings consumed huge amount of non-renewable energy. ”A non-renewable resource (also called a finite resource) is a resource that does not renew itself at a sufficient rate for sustainable economic extraction in meaningful human time-frames. An example is carbon-based, organically-derived fuel. The original organic material, with the aid of heat and pressure, becomes a fuel such as oil or gas. Earth minerals and metal ores, fossil fuels (coal, petroleum, natural gas) and groundwater in certain aquifers are all non-renewable resources.”(from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-renewable_resource). Michael Braungart, the author of this book regard non-renewable as present from our home planet and inheritance of human. The more we consume, the less our future generation own. We need and we have to upcycle, in order to reach sustainable development ( something like reducing the consumption of non-renewable resources, increasing the application of renewable energy cause “their localized replenishment can occur within timeframes meaningful to human”—Wikipedia)

 

Here’s an idea of upcycle~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTbvudQX920