Slow-Tech E-Book

Andrew Price

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

A sailor crossing the Atlantic in a small yacht would want to minimize excess baggage. But it would be unthinkable not to carry more fresh water than seemed necessary, to survive unexpected calms or storms. Yet the imperative of profit, especially over the last century, has driven modernity towards 'lean, mean' strategies in every area of life; squeezing waste out of commercial, technological and environmental systems may make money in the short term, but is our highly geared, highly strung way of life sustainable? Andrew Price, sailor, explorer and environmental scientist at the University of Warwick argues that in the long-term, spare capacity actually pays. From the destruction of New Orleans to the loss of the world's fish-stocks and intractable problems such as MRSA, Slow-Tech demonstrates how the reckless pursuit of efficiency and cost-effectiveness frequently backfires. It makes the case for robustness as an equally important measure of performance in fields as diverse as healthcare, military operations and engineering. Unexpected and counter-intuitive yet convincing and timely, Slow-Tech offers an alternative vision for life in the twenty-first century - a rounded vision of balance and robustness that would be healthier for the planet - and healthier for us.

Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2009 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Copyright © 2009 Andrew R. G. Price,

The moral right of Andrew R. G. Price to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

ISBN: 978-0-857-89161-7

First eBook Edition: October 2010

Atlantic Books

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www.atlantic-books.co.uk

CONTENTS

Cover

Copyright

Acknowledgements

PROLOGUE

INTRODUCTION An alternative to the big squeeze

CHAPTER 1 CIVILIZATION IN CRISIS Over-consume and become a loser

CHAPTER 2 CORPORATE COLLATERAL Globalization and the efficiency delusion

CHAPTER 3 THE LIE OF THE LAND Seeds of fortune and destruction

CHAPTER 4 FROM COAST TO COAST Overwound and in need of repair

CHAPTER 5 GONE FISHING We plough the seas and gather

CHAPTER 6 AQUA VITAE The mainspring for everything

CHAPTER 7 ROBUSTNESS COUNTS Indispensable whiz for all systems

CONCLUSION Towards a new efficiency a civilized approach

EPILOGUE

SELECT READING

INDEX

Acknowledgements

While I was researching and writing the various drafts of Slow-Tech, many gave generously of their time, providing information or sources of information, discussing ideas, reviewing chapters or parts of chapters, or simply providing encouragement. In particular, I would like to thank and acknowledge the following, although, of course, any errors in fact or logic remain my own:

Sara Abdulla, Paul Abel, Jane Abel, Judy Armstrong, Marlin Atkinson, Sylvia Bernard, Adam Blackley, Simon Blackley, Alan Bodfish, Seán Boyle, Nicholas Brealey, Peter Bryan, Brian Clegg, Mike Coates, Jack Cohen, Orin Courtenay, Hugh Doherty, Mike Donlan, John Elder, Melinda Elder, John Ellis, Dessale Fishalzion, Will Gaze, Howard Gibbon, Les Goodall, Alain Jeudy de Grissac, Al Harris, Martin Hartley, David Hartshorn, Julie Hawkins, David Jones, Artemis Kassis, Betty Kay, Matt Keeling, Fareed Krupp, Keith Leppard, Anna Lloyd, Stanley Mann, Desi Maxim, Jacquie McGlade, Mark McKergo, Jeff NcNeely, Graham Medley, ‘E.J.’ Milner Gulland, Andrew Moulson, Duncan Macdonald, Peter Neumark, Peter Nicholls, Sebastian Nokes, Robert Old, Michael Pearson, Marcus Pembrey, Carsten Potsch, Jules Pretty, David Price, Joseph Price, Muireann Price, Sarah Price, Callum Roberts, Julie Robotham, Charles Sheppard, Peter Smith, Gary Steele, Avril Stewart, Ian Stewart, Philip Strickland, Peter Tallack, Simon Taylor, Mike Tildesley, Virginie Tilot, Nelly Trevelyan, Philip Trevelyan, Alicia Venkatachalam, Marcela Vlad, Tom Walker, Geert Wassink, Mike Willoughby, Tony Wilson, Trisha Wilson, John Zarb.

Special thanks go to the many individuals at Atlantic Books involved in the production of Slow-Tech; in particular Toby Mundy for taking on the project, for his help and unwavering enthusiasm throughout; my editor, Emma Grove, for unstinting support and the unenviable task of preventing me from swerving too far off course; and Caroline Knight, Sarah Norman, Sachna Hanspal and Annie Lee.

It would be an omission not to express gratitude to my late parents, Jane (‘J.’) and Peter (‘Jake’), and to David and Anna. I am grateful to them for the many opportunities and shared experiences which influenced the writing of this book. Finally, I thank my own family, Sylvia, Muireann and Joseph, for their support and for having to suffer above-normal levels of obsession while I was researching and writing Slow-Tech.

PROLOGUE

Therefore love moderately: long love doth so; Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.

– William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

Our family never totally bought into efficiency.

At 108 kilos, my father was built for the long haul, and chose his vehicles in his own image (although he himself refused to go metric). Windswept and chilled, my brother and I – both children of the 1950s – would arrive for school in a 1930 racing Bentley. For reasons we never fully understood, my father named the car Phyllis.

To describe this piece of machinery as massive would be an understatement, for at two and half tons it had more in common with a truck than a normal car. With a chassis resembling two steel girders separated by huge crossbars, our Bentley dwarfed almost everything else on the road. Yet so powerful was the beast that a standing start in top gear was effortless – and a party piece my father relished, to the very end. The Great Bentley’s ‘oomph’ lay, of course, in its gargantuan, no-frills, slow-revving engine, all six and a half litres of it. Some claimed that the six cylinders, or pots, were reminiscent of the bore of a mains sewage pipe, but without the sludge.

Yet our car was no slouch. In its heyday, ‘GF8511’, better known as Bentley Team Car No. 3, achieved top speeds in excess of 120 mph at Brooklands race track in England – and, more famously, at the Le Mans 24-hour race (and still does, decades later). As testament to the capability of these slow-tech British racing-green giants, Ettore Bugatti, builder of the invincible Bugatti racing cars of that era, once exclaimed: ‘The Bentley is the fastest lorry I have ever seen!’

Of course, vintage Bentleys could never compete with today’s Formula One racing cars. On the other hand, the latter’s engines are, effectively, disposable: they only have to last two race weekends. And as one Formula One website puts it: ‘Unsurprisingly, engine-related failures remain one of the most common causes of retirement in races.’ Bentley engines were entirely different: after a race weekend, they were stripped down for checking and precautionary maintenance, then the same parts were carefully reassembled – no need for complete replacement. In fact, Billy Rockell, who built virtually every Bentley racing engine and was one of the firm’s most trusted mechanics, claimed to have had few, if any engine failures. As further testament to the durability of these extraordinary machines, many original Bentley engine parts (racing and non-racing) remain in place, and in order, seventy years down the line. One three-litre car, in fact, is still racing on all the original parts fitted at Cricklewood over eighty years ago.

Solid and ‘unrefined’, maybe, yet such apparent lack of sophistication belies an approach to engineering that some say was ahead of its day: absolutely nothing was left to chance, so anything that might go wrong was backed up. The car’s designer, W.O. Bentley, and those who built these cars firmly believed in the wisdom of ‘over-design’, and wide margins of safety. If, for example, both of our Bentley’s electric fuel pumps happened to conk out, the driver could pump up and pressurize the forty-five-gallon petrol tank, manually, and force-feed the carburettors that way. More amazing still, if the starter motor failed, all was not lost: a knob on the dashboard would trigger off a shower of sparks from the ‘trembler’ coil into the cylinders. And, hey presto, as if by magic, the powerhouse under the bonnet would roar into action. If even that failed, there was always the starting handle. The ignition system was doubled up, too, as were the rear brakes. You could lose the braking on any two wheels and the car would still stop in a straight line.

To ensure our Bentley kept going during long-haul races, there were some very cunning devices, all installed for insurance and back-up. If, for example, heavy use of the brakes wore them down, the driver could easily adjust them, while still in the saddle, by using a handily placed adjuster which you turned as you drove along; there was no need for a pit stop. Similarly, if oil consumption rose as the revs were cranked up over prolonged periods, turning a tap under the dashboard would instantly drop an extra gallon into the engine’s enormous (six-gallon) sump.

On top of that, the slow-revving Bentley engines were comparatively efficient at converting fuel to power; at 2,500 rpm, the Speed Six would generate 230 brake horsepower – it was a very big ‘bang for your bucks’, even by Formula One standards today. A modern Formula One engine, in contrast, will rev eight times as fast for just under four times the power gain; and it will have a far worse fuel consumption than the Speed Six, which is bad enough (ten to fourteen miles per gallon) – though, admittedly, a far greater power to weight ratio, and speed.

Longevity was another signature of old Bentleys, and an outcome of their massive construction and complete absence of corner-cutting – and, of course, of some tender loving care, though less than one might suppose. Nearly eighty years on, and now with a new owner, ours just keeps on going: a piece of living motor-racing history.

Bentleys still in use are, unquestionably, ace gas-guzzlers; their colour may be green, but not so their emissions or their ‘ecological footprint’ (although a well-tuned vintage Bentley is still capable of passing the modern emissions test). Yet if factors such as prolonged existence – reducing the need to scrap or recycle – and absence of electronic chips (which carry environmental costs) are taken into account, claims that these vintage relics are little more than inefficient, polluting monsters may be slightly wide of the mark.

Being able to keep on going, even against the odds, was my father’s approach to life, too – aided, it must be said, by a physique as unmistakable and imposing as his beloved Bentley. The surprising thing was that he was remarkably speedy, at least when it came to long-distance swimming races and water polo back in his youth. But it would be a mistake to suppose that his performance had anything whatsoever to do with a high-tech, let alone sensible diet. Were he alive today – in an era of slow-release carbs, balanced proteins and fats, high-nutrient drinks and the like – he would have none of it. Quite the opposite. Shortly before a swimming event, my father merely stoked calories, whatever their form. Treacle pudding and custard was, we recall, his favourite racing formula. Yet at water sports he excelled, and his regimen seemed to pay dividends; at least, it never held him back.

Years later at the seaside, his competitive days long over, my father would ferry my sister and me through the waves, one perched on each shoulder. As a final testament to his unassailability, consider the following incident. Once, en route to work in Manchester after doing the school round, the Bentley suffered a puncture. Without ado, he pulled off the road, jacked up the car and began to change the wheel. Like a bolt from the blue another car, totally out of control, came hurtling round the corner. Worse still, it slid off the road and squashed my father; we do not recall if it was between the two cars or against the embankment. Either way, in hospital later that day, he admitted to losing all the air from his lungs, to which the doctor replied that he was lucky that was not all he had lost. Astonishingly, besides bruising, he escaped virtually unscathed.

When it came to boats – our family’s second great passion – my father found little to be gained from anything bordering on the flimsy or insubstantial. Summer holidays were spent sailing around Anglesey and Ireland, not in a yacht of the day, but in our family’s massive pilot cutter, built in the early days of the twentieth century. Graced by a gilded semiclad mermaid, her bow sliced impressively through the water while struggling to keep up with the times. Yet Mermaid, and other traditional sailing craft like her, carried an impressive pedigree and record, particularly when it came to safety.

Like the example of the old Bentleys, the following tales about sailing sum up, for me, everything beneficial that Slow-Tech claims about over-provision – you could call it the wisdom of ‘overkill’. Nothing could be more different from corner-cutting for ‘efficiency’, the unstoppable but dangerous crusade modernity chose to embark upon a century or more back.

In their heyday, English pilot cutters ventured on modest sorties, from the UK’s sheltered waters to the open Atlantic or North Sea. Their purpose: to escort incoming shipping through the hazardous shallow waters to the safety of port, winter or summer. Rivalry was intense, as British sailor and writer Tom Cunliffe points out; so there were some ‘very fast pilot cutters driven hard by some really desperate characters’. Not surprisingly, then, pilot cutters were seaworthy and reliable, returning to port at a quick tempo if it was blowing hard. Centenarians, maybe, but for the likes of my father, being at sea with something solid beneath your feet was what counted most. In his eyes, only this sort of packhorse was capable of providing the no-nonsense cruising experience he sought and achieved.

But it is not just their stout construction, or kindly sea-motion, that makes pilot cutters so safe and appealing. More subtle forces, paradoxically, also come to bear. Because of their old-fashioned features – straight stem, long keel and old-fashioned gaff-rigged sail plan – these boats can actually steer themselves, unassisted. Without anyone standing at the helm, or an auto-pilot, they just keep sailing. These boats manage to hold their course, simply with the helm lashed. Put another way, pilot cutters are virtually immune against being knocked off course; but, should that happen, they automatically get back on track. With a falling barometer, rising seas and a seasick crew, what could be a more worthwhile boat trait? For one, it gives the helmsman, whose eyes are normally glued to the compass for hours on end, a welcome break.

Modern yachts, at best only tolerated by my father, are indisputably faster and more responsive, which of course is what helps them win races. But their lighter construction and flighty behaviour carries a downside; for high-tech yachts, unlike their sturdier elders, will not so easily stay on course unless, of course, steered manually or by an auto-pilot.

But perhaps nothing illustrates more forcefully the remarkable capacity of a vessel – especially traditional sailing craft – to chill out when confronting stormy seas than a slow-tech, safety measure called ‘heaving to’, which it amounts to sailing-but-stalled. Once in that state, with the helm lashed, a boat can be more or less left to its own devices. It involves having the sails on opposite sides, instead of on the same side, and the boat lying about fifty degrees from the wind. In one story, while a storm raged in North America’s eastern waters, yachtsman Tom Cunliffe and crew simply went below deck in their Bristol Channel pilot cutter, Hirta. It was comfortably ‘hove to’ and they decided to play Scrabble. Snugged down, it enabled them to bide time until the weather abated.

Heaving to also has a calming effect on the sea, not just on the crew. By drifting slowly, obliquely to the wind, the keel of a boat in that condition actually creates its own smooth slick of water, on which the vessel safely perches and bobs. Yet just metres beyond, the seas boil in anger. According to yachtsman Larry Pardy, heaving to may be the ultimate survival strategy for impending hurricane-force winds.

Quite plainly, when it came to cars and boats, strength, safety and sustainability were what our family believed mattered most. No less substantial was the Aga, an old-fashioned, oil-fired heat-storage cooker. Centre-stage in the kitchen and packed with sixteen cubic feet of natural insulation (vermiculite), it occupied more space even than my father. The Aga sustained us and breathed warmth and life into our home, day in, day out. The only trouble was it ran constantly, except during rare heatwaves. Invented and patented in 1922 by Dr Gustaf Dalén, a Swedish Nobel prize-winning physicist, this cooker is by conventional reckoning inefficient – nothing less than a cast-iron dinosaur that devours £10 notes one after the other. But this is only half the tale, a lopsided and incomplete portrayal of an Aga’s true performance.

Fast forward two decades to the 1970s, and out in the cut-and-thrust workplace I realized that my family’s fondness for sustainability, its admiration for the strength and quality of a bygone era, was both nostalgic and eccentric. After all, slickness of operations through corner-cutting and other efficiency drives already had much of the Western world in its thrall. To our contemporaries, efficiency had come to symbolize performance, effectiveness and even satisfaction. At least part of me, too, had come to accept that retaining the inessential was inefficient and verging on history: being ‘lean and mean’ really was the name of the game.

Yet I could not completely dispel some nagging doubts. My professional background as an ecologist and environmental scientist made me realize that nature is complex and full of constraints and compromises. With insufficient in reserve, too little ‘spare capacity’ to bounce back after a catastrophic event, such as a serious disease or major oil spill, populations of species dwindle, or crash: in extreme cases, extinction is the price tag. Perhaps my father’s sentiments about insurance and back-up in cars, boats and Agas – the very opposite of squeezing things to the limit – did, after all, contain nuggets of truth. Quite possibly, they might even provide some valuable lessons for modernity. Like the early nineteenth-century English Luddites, who destroyed textile machines – but only because they felt they threatened their livelihood – my father was not totally anti-technology. In his eyes, though, there was no guarantee that cutting-edge stuff was inevitably superior to the old, or the best way forward, either.

In 1981, virtually becalmed for fifty-five days in the Indian Ocean, I began to have even more serious doubts about the wisdom of modernity’s obsession with efficiency, and reluctance to keep sufficient, if anything, in reserve. We were on a slow boat to China: ‘Sindbad voyagers’ on a replica of a ninth-century Arab sailing ship. On this international expedition I was resident marine biologist. In the damp and salty conditions, one by one Sohar’s few electronic gadgets failed; corrosion by hydrogen sulphide from deep in the ship’s bowels probably made things worse.

Those gizmos had not lasted long. Just days before our departure from Muscat in November 1980, the chandlers in England had sent out a replacement depth-sounder, plus some other electronics. They were hardly in keeping with the mission: sailing a stitched, medieval look-alike vessel along the ancient Spice Route. The aids were partly to verify the ancient navigational methods being tested, and also to add a little security and comfort to our lives. But during the frenetic preparations for departure, one of the crew had thrown the ship’s electronics – still wrapped – on to the fire along with other rubbish. Their charred remains were needed in England for insurance purposes. By the time the voyage ended in China, eight months later, few of the replacement units were functioning.

The insight, when it came, struck suddenly, perhaps an aftershock from the lightning that bolted through my arm while I was collecting rainwater on deck. A second power, currently eclipsed by conventional views of efficiency, was needed to counterbalance and temper its supremacy: robustness, something in reserve – the upshot of deliberately retaining or adding ‘unproductive’ baggage. That’s robustness simply put. Yet from it comes something more powerful and profound than toughness and the ability of things to keep going when the going gets tough.

INTRODUCTION

An alternative to the big squeeze

Disappearing under our feet

The power of the ‘inessential’ is a simple message, but it resonates far and wide. For keeping sufficient in reserve adds power to the present and insures against the impending. Yet modernity has been remarkably slow to grasp such a fundamental ‘law of nature’. Perhaps the huge toll from the 2004 Sumatran tsunami – more than 283,000 deaths – is really what awoke us from a complacent slumber; and, less than one year later, the devastating effects from hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Stan in the USA and Central America. These events began to shake the world, quite literally, like never before.

In the case of the damage to New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the artificial floodwalls or levees were supposed to have protected the city against a 100-year storm – one so severe it might only strike once in a century. When the Army Corps of Engineers constructed the levees, decades earlier, individuals in charge must have believed – or silently prayed – that sufficient insurance had been made in the town’s coastal defence. Anything more, in their eyes, would be unnecessary and an inefficient use of costly resources.

The problem is, though, that much of New Orleans and coastal Louisiana are below sea level. On top of that, the city was sinking under its own weight, and worse still, certain activities were accelerating the process. Consider, for example, the extraction of natural resources. By withdrawing groundwater and oil from sediment beneath it, New Orleans was, quite literally, pulling the ground out from under its own feet. Given the precarious setting of the city, blind faith in levees that lacked sufficient over-provision – an engineering solution that provided only partial insurance – proved to be a dangerous precedent. As TV viewers the world over witnessed, the effects of Katrina were devastating; and predictably so. On top of over 1,800 (direct and indirect) deaths, and loss of homes, came the ruining of livelihoods. If that was not enough, there was the silencing, albeit temporarily, of one of the world’s greatest musical hubs, as musicians joined the throng of fleeing residents.

The stark reality is that Katrina dealt the worst civil engineering disaster in American history, largely because high-tech buffers to protect New Orleans were insufficiently substantial and fell wide of the mark, nature’s own free defences having already been undermined.

The Dutch, incontestably the world’s elite when it comes to engineered coastal defences, so-called ‘hard construction’ techniques, are more cautious: they design flood barriers with serious overkill, to withstand a 10,000 year mother-of-surges. As in New Orleans, though, most inhabitants of the Netherlands live below sea level, and Dutch society is also one where lives and livelihoods hang, delicately poised, on dependable coastal protection. But if steel-and-concrete fixes are necessary, the only ones worth having, in their eyes, are ones that really work. Reliable artificial defence, of course, does not come cheap, especially as it means deliberately instilling ‘spare capacity’ that would be superfluous and unnecessary most of the time.

Wider fallout

The uncomforting tale of Katrina exposes something more profound and far-reaching than the power of the ‘inessential’, the need for adequate engineering and technological fixes – whether to save our skin, or in situations which are not so life-threatening. What we’re talking of here is why the world is experiencing so many different environmental and other disasters large and small, in the first place, and whether going high-tech is always ‘the one best way’ so often acclaimed.

Added to the problem of coastal vulnerability, in fact linked to it in the case of increasing hurricane strength, are the scary effects of climate change and sea-level rise. More alarming still, tropical storms seem to be on the increase and they are becoming more ferocious. Engineered structures previously relied upon to do the job properly can themselves, all of a sudden, become fragile, especially if coastal development has already damaged the coral reefs, wetlands – ‘worthless swamps’ – and other natural habitats which should have provided natural defences. In the case of the USA, according to its Geological Survey, New Orleans and the wider state of Louisiana has lost 1,900 square miles of wetland over the past seven decades to pave the way for roads, marinas, condominiums and business facilities. In a way this is understandable. After all, they have got to go somewhere and, surely, some sacrifices of nature are inevitable. Besides, many planners and engineers probably felt that ridding the region of disagreeable wetlands was actually doing local society a favour; that is, of course, in addition to providing sites for development.

Yet in their zest for economic expansion, without bothering to look over their shoulder, the people who called the shots had overlooked something fundamental: wetlands absorb and store floodwater, and act like a giant sponge. The irony was that these areas turned out to be anything but inessential. They should, and could, have helped provide New Orleans with physical defence against Hurricane Katrina. But overzealous developments had seriously cut into this invaluable protection and insurance service. Quite plainly, nature’s buffers are not so dispensable after all. Hurricane Gustav provided another stark reminder in 2008.

Environmental researcher Alicia Venkatachalam, based at Warwick University, recently conducted a survey in southern Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami. This revealed that 94 per cent of the 297 fishermen interviewed believed that mangrove vegetation decreased the number of human fatalities caused by the tsunami waves. (Actually, 498 fishermen were interviewed, but 201 respondents scored mangroves as ‘not present’ and did not provide an opinion about their possible role in coastal protection.) A similar picture emerged when it came to protection by mangroves against housing damage.

Of course, no shock-absorber, natural or made-made, could possibly have given full protection against such an unprecedented, deadly assault; casualties, sadly, were an inevitable outcome. Some mathematical models even cast doubt on mangroves being any help at all against the tsunami (although, it has to be said, inundation distance was their measure of impact, something that may be very different from fatalities). On the other hand, one study after another, around the world, has opened our eyes to the protective and other benefits of natural habitats.

So much so that the USA and other developed nations are beginning, albeit gradually, to see the wisdom of going with nature rather than battling against it. First and foremost, by avoiding, where possible, whole-scale clearing of so-called ‘worthless swamps’ in the first place. And if intervention is necessary to bolster up coastal defences – when, for example, natural systems have been dramatically mined and undermined – ‘soft construction’ can work wonders. One example is the simple lowtech expedient of using planted vegetation to trap blown sand. For this encourages the growth of dunes, the first line of defence, not unlike pawns in a game of chess: little clout individually, yet, in a line, an arsenal to be reckoned with. When it comes to protecting development structures against the environment (or, paradoxically, vice versa), slowing the flow that way entails little more than use of natural materials and natural processes. Admittedly, the ‘soft fix’ is not an immediate solution. Compared with ‘hard construction’ techniques, though, these slow-tech ways are cheaper to construct and maintain and, what’s more, they may be self-sustaining.

An even more radical and enlightened alternative to coastal protection, and simpler still, goes one step further. It entails, quite literally, going with the flow. What we are talking of here is that long-known army tactic called, euphemistically, managed retreat: in the present context, it is little more than deliberately allowing an area that was previously high-and-dry to become flooded by the sea and washed by sediment – the raw building material, of course, for terra firma. Sooner or later this creates new inter-tidal land, salt marsh or coastal vegetation. Were he alive today, it is an approach that my father – purveyor par excellence of slow-tech – would have sanctioned with heart and soul.

As the news reminds us, we are experiencing catastrophes like the ones mentioned on a grand scale, with devastating impacts on ourselves and our world. Nature’s ability to withstand such shocks has been weakened. In no small way, it is the outcome of habitual and repetitive ‘mining’ of the earth’s natural resources. Much of it boils down to a product-hungry world, economic growth and unfettered development, whatever the wider costs. To make this all possible, corporate bosses insist that returns must always be bigger, year on year.

What is so surprising, given what is at stake, is that unrestrained economic growth has been allowed to go on for so long. On top of that, of course, there is the relentless squeeze from humanity’s burgeoning population, particularly in poorer parts of the world. No one can deny that sheer numbers exert a big pressure on the environment, too. What’s more, the global population is still increasing. One way or another, both our lives and our economic necks are now on the line, like never before.

The harsh reality is that damage to environmental resources, and their inability to spring back, can be enough to push a civilization over the tipping point; or, in less extreme situations, to make life exceedingly uncomfortable. In order to retain the earth’s natural ability to withstand such onslaughts, we need to keep some spare capacity – the so-called inessential. The deliberate act of retaining ‘unproductive baggage’ can, ironically, mean that crisis management through high-tech restoration projects can actually become unnecessary in the first place, or at least far less costly. Either way, it helps avoid catastrophic failures. Consider, as a bleak reminder, what happened to New Orleans. And, if we have been unwise enough to trade too much of the ‘inessential’, for short-term pursuits and products, then re-instilling it invariably gives a payoff.

Robustness in a nutshell

Robustness is that visible or invisible whiz that allows a system to absorb shocks and surprises, without failing catastrophically, then continue (sometimes through re-structuring) more or less ‘business as usual’. Whether we are talking of the wetlands around New Orleans, or protective coral reefs, many of the individual ecosystems that the earth consists of are naturally robust. When not weakened by profit-driven intervention, or relentless population pressures, they are resilient against all sorts of attack: they self-repair, they have spare parts, and they can endure for millennia; often, in fact, much longer, if only given the chance.

In this respect, the human body behaves no differently. During a lifetime, our bodies are exposed to an onslaught of assaults – from unwelcome bacteria and viruses to concussion and broken bones – and sometimes insults, too. Yet, more often than not, we live to greet another dawn. A Bentley (or more modern machine) enduring a tough race after being hammered around the track, or a yacht surviving a gruelling sea passage, echoes precisely the same principles. Robustness, one way or another, is what helps ecosystems, humans or objects to keep going, even when the going gets tough.

Persistence, especially through solidity, is the most down-to-earth type of robustness. That a concrete wharf is robust hardly takes rocket science to know: through extreme ‘over-engineering’, its massive construction instils robustness against virtually everything – save being rammed by a tanker. Most of the time, though, the wharf does not really need to be that strong; there is deliberate ‘overkill’ or redundancy, just in case. It is a case of over-engineering on a grander scale than even our 6½ litre Bentley. To a lesser degree, this is what enables a coral reef to withstand day-to-day knocks and scrapes. Being struck and mounted by a cruise ship is, of course, quite another matter. That is robustness at its crudest, a notion that chimes with our intuition. Overdosing on materials is not all that counts, though. ‘Design’ plays its part, too, as in the case of the shell of a nut, whose curves and form imbue it with the toughness and durability that enhance chances of survival.

Paradoxically, though, robustness is normally something far more subtle and enigmatic, yet, at the same time, more powerful.

Robustness through spare parts is another approach to back-up. Having more than one part of the system perform the same or similar tasks is a very different, more refined, approach to redundancy than brute strength alone. This type of spare capacity has another advantage: it can also create flexibility – against problems now, and others that might arise in the future. We are glad to have two kidneys, not just one – especially if one has to be removed, either because of an untreatable condition (especially if it might affect other organs) or for transplant into someone else: normally one kidney is enough, and the other inessential, but it can be risky to bank on it, especially in a hot climate.

According to biologist Andreas Wagner at the Santa Fe Institute and University of New Mexico, back-up through spare parts is the main ‘pillar of system reliability’ in engineering. It is partly because building systems with spare parts is straightforward, at least conceptually, although technically this may not always be quite so easy. Just as in the human body, aircraft demonstrate, reassuringly, that duplication of critical parts is one sure way of instilling robustness. Take the Boeing 777 or Airbus. Extreme weather – high winds, torrential rainstorms and lightning strikes – or engineering failures, anywhere from nose to tail, are disturbances that can potentially create disaster in countless ways. The only trouble is that added extras don’t always come cheap – if not in dollars, then in weight or space. To the aircrew and passengers up at 10,000 metres, though, nothing could be better value for money.

We cherish the ‘inessential’, not surprisingly, when it comes to saving our own skin, for example when we fly in aircraft. It is a different matter, though, in the case of the environment. Here we seem quite happy to treat robustness of ecosystems as ‘surplus to requirements’, and trade it to fuel economic progress and development – whatever the costs, and whatever the outcome. And we should be under no illusions: the collateral damage is immense. That’s the irony, given that, even in our high-tech era, natural ecosystems remain our bread-and-butter, both for food and finance.

The concepts, and several examples above, come from man-made or ‘engineered’ systems. This book is mainly about natural systems, but it takes many words from the jargon used to describe engineering. These also provide helpful analogies as to why robustness around us matters, and is less dispensable than we care to believe. In the case of redundancy, the earlier tale about our old Bentley’s double electric fuel pumps (plus a mechanical back-up system) is one such instance. Few would pretend, of course, especially in today’s climate, that a vintage car can come anywhere near a blueprint, leitmotif or last word in design and engineering; the Bentley’s fondness for fuel, for example, has already been mentioned. Besides, these relics of a bygone era now change hands for such colossal sums that they are, except for the seriously well off, simply unaffordable.

The real point here, though, is that the degree of duplication of parts might seem excessive: indeed, for most of the time carrying two additional, identical pumps was inessential. But, on more than one occasion at Le Mans 24-hour races, you can bet there was a pay-off. Precisely the same principles apply when it comes to having sufficient spare provision in ecosystems, and in fact in almost every system, and what these mean, for the environment and society alike.

Robustness through self-adjustment is another type of ‘robustness through flexibility’. This works even more cunningly than back-up by means of identical parts. Here, interaction of numerous and different system parts ensures smooth working while compensating for effects of disturbance. For reasons that will become clear, this is sometimes called ‘distributed robustness’. Unlike straightforward redundancy, where two or more system parts perform the same function, distributed robustness is not simply other parts standing in for the failed part.

This type of robustness is spread across the system. For organisms, including us humans, Andreas Wagner believes, distributed robustness (through complex genetic architectures) may be more important than simply overdosing on spare parts. The same goes for the Boeing 727, despite the need to duplicate or triplicate really critical bits. Similar principles apply to the environment and ecosystems, with their myriad different species – whose roles will vary to a greater or lesser extent. For example, some massive reef builders, as in the case of certain Porites corals, act like a breakwater and provide physical defence. Yet other corals, ones that on the face of it are less stout, deliver services that may be no less dispensable. For they provide a more subtle, rearguard action if, for example, environmental conditions change out of the blue. As an aside, it may be added that the significance of particular species (like all sorts of other system parts) often transpires only once they have disappeared; hence, there really is wisdom in the precautionary principle.

Tendency to self-regulation, self-repair or self-replication are examples par excellence of distributed robustness. For many systems, this adjust-as-you-go behaviour provides an astonishing degree of plasticity; that invisible and magical whiz, working away in the background and taken for granted. Purring along smoothly is what nature does much of the time, assuming, of course, that modernity has not carved it up too much in the process of development; so too do certain mechanical systems – as in the case of old-fashioned governors on steam engines or, closer to home, the automatic switching on and off of household central heating.

In fact, negative feedback – the jargon used to describe this sort of behaviour – helps create smooth running and robustness in all biological systems. For an organism’s ability to maintain constant states in the face of change, physiologist Walter Cannon coined the term ‘homeostasis’ back in 1932. Just as an electrical thermostat regulates the switching on and off of radiators, so too, via a sensor in the brain, our body keeps close to an optimal temperature of thirty-seven degrees; for example by sweating or shivering. Negative feedback operates in all sorts of complex systems, at higher and higher scales right up to ecosystems and even the planet; for example, forests (indirectly) lead to cloud formation. Both provide essential checks and balances that assist in climate regulation and moderation, and instil robustness, at least up to a point.

This is the essence of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis; a daring pronouncement that the earth is a self-regulating system. Once the ‘tipping point’ is reached, though, the system can easily fail to compensate. Worse still, once flipped into an altered state, positive feedback – precisely the opposite of negative feedback – can then easily kick in and take over. Positive feedback leads to an increase in (rather than dampening of) an effect; often this creates greater fragility and, in the case of climate, it can make it warm up very rapidly. That, it turns out, is what seems to be happening, right now.

The myth of immutability or, in engineering jargon, the ‘robust-yet-fragile’ paradox, is one of the most tantalizing features of living and non-living systems. To all who knew him, my father was the epitome of robustness. His ability to walk away, virtually unscathed (though to say smiling would be an exaggeration), after being crushed by a car bears testament to this. By most reckonings, it was a miracle he came out alive. Yet, at the age of only sixty-six years, he succumbed to a rare auto-immune disease: an illness amounting to the body’s tissues attacking its own immune system. In his case, it was polyarteritis nodosa, in which the body’s blood vessels become damaged and, one by one, different organs start to pack up. The condition can be stabilized, but the cause is unknown and there is still no proper cure. Perhaps smoking at least sixty cigarettes a day from the age of seventeen (or younger) eventually took its toll.

Despite best efforts to instil robustness, complete guarantees are never possible. It is little short of a quest for the unattainable. The fact is that fool-proof disease control eludes us, as the fate of my father reminds us. Similarly, an ecosystem or species might survive the harshest of winters but collapse unexpectedly when a new virus appears. Take the influenza pandemic of 1918–19. That virus killed more people than died in World War I: 20 million or possibly even 40 million people. According to some, it was the most devastating epidemic in world history. Known as ‘La Grippe’ or ‘Spanish Flu’, the virus wiped out more people than any other single disease outbreak, surpassing even the Black Death of the Middle Ages. Sequencing the virus’s RNA, collected from the lung tissue of a dead soldier, pointed to a novel H1N1 influenza A virus of exceptional virulence. The weird thing is that, over their lifetime, most victims must have fended off a host of other bugs and immune system assaults. One wonders what might have happened if the H5N1 avian flu virus had really taken hold in 2007. The really scary thing is that scientists believe the 1918 virus infected humans by mutating from bird flu.

Or consider coral reefs: like the human immune system, some things they can tolerate, others they cannot. The calcareous outer skeleton of many corals can withstand the relentless pounding of waves, even from a violent storm. Exposure to sediment plumes from nearby coastal construction operations, on the other hand, can be completely crippling – to the coral animal’s inner workings and, sooner or later, to the reef’s overall condition and health. On the face of it, you might regard sand grains as a mild and innocuous disturbance. Yet it is one from which a coral reef may not easily recover.

The ‘robust yet fragile’ paradox is an inescapable reality. To lose what robustness and insurance a system does possess can, therefore, be extremely hazardous. As TV and news reports remind us, almost daily, this is happening more and more to natural systems, often through the ‘unnatural’ actions of ill-conceived development projects, all, ironically, in the name of progress.

Robustness, as the above illustrations demonstrate, plainly portrays an extraordinary richness of meaning. As testament, mathematician Erica Jen and colleagues have posted eighteen or so different ways of characterizing robustness on the website of the Santa Fe Institute.

It should also be said that robustness theory is not yet mature. Unlike at least superficial measures of efficiency, there is no simple equation for robustness. Its meaning is even broader and more enigmatic and ethereal than efficiency. But this richness of meaning – including, curiously and paradoxically, innovation and change (the very opposite of how we normally expect robustness to act) – is actually far more its strength than a limitation, for it helps us get to the very heart of performance. Robustness, it turns out, is also the best tool we have for understanding and retaining what counts, for most of the time.

It is not that we should simply turn the clocks back, or ditch silicon for iron and rope. By striking a better balance between immediacy and the long view, though, nature and the things we create would be less highly strung.

What is so surprising is that robustness can spring to the fore from such low-tech, unsophisticated fixes: planting vegetation to help create sand dunes for coastal protection, and so on. Furthermore, repairs of any sort would often be unnecessary, had we not tampered with natural systems, inadvertently and in ignorance, in the first place. It turns out that many high-tech interventions, for example from some agribusinesses, do not actually turn out to be miracle solutions at all, and worse still, some, quite plainly, are doing more harm than good.

Sacrificing the ‘indispensable’: why robustness so easily gets eclipsed

Modernity’s casual indifference to robustness – verging on disdainful neglect – has accompanied a growing love affair with immediacy and ‘efficiency’. As just one reminder, consider the fate of ‘worthless swamps’, often sacrificed to make way for unfettered development and economic growth. Robustness so often plays second fiddle and gets ditched.

In many ways, opting for ‘development at all costs’ was inevitable. Throughout the twentieth century, for example, over-provision – making things stronger than seems really necessary – was to become the epitome of inefficiency; our racing Bentley, hugely over-engineered and great for the long haul, was a prime example in the motor car industry. Pruning down – whether for outright speed, or for leanness and efficiency more generally – was thought to be the best way forward. In the eyes of many, this was the fastest if not the only gateway to performance, efficiency and even satisfaction. But with it can come something less agreeable.

It is the same whether we’re talking businesses, motor racing, national economic growth or globalization. Immediacy is what counts, never mind any inconvenient knock-on effects. But the price modernity pays for the short view – efficiency at all costs – has been colossal. Quite plainly, the environment has been one sacrificial pawn in the game. The real irony, though, is that economic interests can suffer, too. Often this arises from unanticipated and disagreeable knock-on effects, created by a weakened environment, as in the case of New Orleans and hurricane Katrina. (Of course squeezing commercial enterprises too far can have more direct, adverse effects on performance.)

We may now be in the second millennium, yet, judging from the environmental consequences of our actions, it is hardly an era of enlightenment; or one that future generations are going to look back on and thank us for.

As a result of our obsession with immediacy, and an increasingly product-hungry public, our focus simply does not penetrate far into the future. The long view, more reverently ‘sustainability’, may be admired and practised by environmental groups such as Greenpeace, and by health worshippers. Even the global sporting giant Adidas-Salomon declares itself ‘dedicated to socially responsible, safe and environmentally sustainable practices in the company’. Or take Toyota, Alcoa – the world’s largest producer of aluminium – and British Petroleum. These corporate lions, including Adidas, happened to be among firms specially earmarked in 2005 for superior sustainability.

The truth, though, is that in many private and public sector eyes sustainability means greater concern for the environment than the job in hand, too many staff, or too much stock. Worse still, they exclaim, it is a stranglehold on efficiency, a corporate straitjacket; and in our competitive world slickness, trimming things down, is all that really counts. Little wonder, then, that the coastal wetlands that ‘invisibly’ protected New Orleans were barely spared a thought, as development, and other dictates of free enterprise, propelled the city through the twentieth century and into the next.

It is hardly surprising, then, that efficiency – focusing on what seems to count, now, and disregarding or cutting what does not – has become the holy grail of performance measures: the rallying cry of a quasi-moral crusade. One major and often overlooked problem, though, is deciding and agreeing what is ‘important’; efficiency is invariably subjective and ambiguous. The questions ‘Efficiency for whom?’, ‘Efficiency at what cost?’ and ‘Efficiency over what time?’ are seldom asked. In fact, narrow or ill-defined measures of efficiency now influence virtually every sphere of modern life, so powerful is the grip of the efficiency trap. But, if modernity is brutally honest, it is also an efficiency delusion.

Efficiency acclaims the merits of production with minimal effort. It embodies the quest for getting more from less, or even something for nothing; engineers see it as the ratio of output to input. In the business world it relates to the cost of achieving a certain aim – and it is here that the concept has had a love affair with people like no other. Corporate giants and small companies alike strive for ever higher annual profits by becoming lean and mean; hang the indirect fallout, on the environment or wherever else knock-on effects might strike. Even though it can be a risky business, quite literally, anything except ‘more and faster’ amounts, in their eyes, to poor practice, and second best . . . or worse.

Outside the corporate world, the fast track – the dangerous lane – can also provide rewards; better still, immediate gratification. Take heavy smoking, drinking or fast driving. You can hardly dismiss these quick fixes as merely youthful indulgences, or minority activities. In fact, childhood dares, extreme sports and other ‘cerebral climaxes’ seem to be precisely what humans crave. Might the quick fix, whether for speed efficiency in the corporate world, or simply for leisure, have some inherent logic after all?

Seen in this light, it is almost as if we are actually hard-wired for the quick fix, an immediate solution; something that is at least partly genetic. Consider, as one of many illustrations, that universal survival extinct – the fight-or-flight response. This is triggered by the adrenalin rush and, as mentioned, our fondness for daredevil pursuits; these might suggest at least some ‘in-built’ impermanence or transience about human behaviour. The truth is that in desperate (and sometimes not so desperate) situations, cannibalism is a grim reality. As a nerve-jangling reminder, consider what sometimes happened to sailors adrift for weeks in a small boat, once the food had run out: eat for survival now, and hang the consequences, is what made sense in their eyes.

What, ultimately, is at stake

The here-and-now mindset, being on the go, at lightning speed 24/7, seems to be modernity’s approach to going about daily affairs. It is, after all, what many now believe it takes for ‘efficiency’ and ‘success’. The approach is one that could not be more different from the more enlightened ways reminiscent of bygone days – yet, curiously, still alive and well in some places; that is, building for the long haul, through robustness, in an attempt to avoid catastrophic failure and for assured performance. As many examples demonstrate, this is not simply scaremongering or pie-in-the-sky theory, unlinked to reality. For disaster can easily strike anywhere down the line, including the environment, and, as mentioned, the pursuit of efficiency can backfire in more direct ways.

Simply put, many recurring issues and choices confronting modernity boil down to a conflict of interests: ‘efficiency of industry and development’; globalization, mass commercialization and capitalism, immediate gratification – lubricated, invariably, by high technology versus ‘robustness of ecosystems’; nurturing natural resources, localization, not-for-massive-profits, self-sufficiency, delayed gratification and adoption of less invasive technology.

Ever since the Luddites tried to defend their textile jobs by destroying factory looms in the early 1800s, the ‘efficiency of industry’/’robustness of ecosystems’ camps have disagreed over these two opposing and fiercely contested sets of interests and alternatives. After 200 years advocates of ‘efficiency’ (at-all-costs), by and large, still crack the whip. They proclaim that the environment is a luxury which, inevitably, must bow to the dictates of industry and development. Yet chasms in this simplistic and flawed ethos and dream world are beginning to open up, before our very eyes; the tide may be gradually beginning to turn. For example, the recent Paris Declaration is starting to bring about more effective and appropriate aid. Likewise, the Equator Principles insist on international business operating in a more socially and environmentally sound manner.

Because ‘industry/ecosystem’ issues are so fundamental to us all, they are a major part of this book’s thrust. It would, naturally, be naïve and wide of the mark to suppose that nothing else drives the world, both forwards and backwards; but that is not what Slow-Tech is trying to claim. Besides the impositions and repercussions from ever-greater ‘efficiency of industry and development’, there are now also huge (environmental and social) pressures simply from the sheer numbers of people going about their daily business, often in traditional and relatively modest ways. That is one case in point and an issue already mentioned. Yet the collateral from their activities, even if they are not ‘industrial’ or necessarily ‘efficient’, can also be substantial.

On the other hand, there seems little doubt that environmental fallout from modernity’s quest for ever-greater ‘efficiency of industry and development’ now equals, and in many places exceeds, that created by less pushy or commercial actions of society; that is from people not under the spell of efficiency at all costs. Writer and environmentalist George Monbiot, for one, believes economic activity to be the immediate and overwhelming threat. Either way, the ‘robustness of ecosystems’ – an excellent buffer and antidote, up to a point, against the quivers and shocks imposed on nature – ends up on the line.

Why robustness matters, though, goes beyond safeguarding the integrity of environmental systems, and the many goods and services that flow from its natural captial – but which, all too easily, can slow from a flood to a trickle. Undeniably, the environment remains the cornerstone and powerhouse for the life, prosperity and well-being of our civilization, even if many corporate leaders and politicians have become blind to such a simple fact. What we’re talking of here, though, is an influence of robustness that is no less pervasive and universal: the wisdom of retaining sufficent slack (and other froms of robustness) in all systems, as an alternative to driving most of it away in virtually everything we do, touch or create. This feckless behaviour – efficiency fanatics’ solution to pretty much everything – has plunged society deep into an ‘efficiency trap’ entirely of its own making, though far from everyone’s liking.

The modern world now marches to the beat of the corporate drum. With all spare capacity removed in today’s managerial style, though, ‘efficient’ systems often fail to deliver. On close inspection, it becomes clear that robustness is lacking in many spheres of life, often the result of squeezing everything too far.