(Originally posted at FastCompany.com on August 8, 2011.)

The world’s forests double as the planet’s lungs. So when it comes to a natural solution to sequestering carbon emissions, a pressing question is exactly how much air those lungs can hold. The answer is better than expected—and the unlikely reason may have to do with our increased urban living.

Last month, Science published a study led by U.S. Forest Service researcher Yude Pan that found the world’s established forests absorb 2.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year, or about a third of the total released by burning fossil fuels. This carbon sink was not only higher than expected, but actually increased between 1990 and 2007. Tropical deforestation in places like Indonesia and Brazil appears to be the only thing holding forests back from even greater sequestration—net deforestation (i.e. the difference between gross deforestation and forest re-growth) emits 1.3 billion tons annually. And deforestation is getting worse, right? Not necessarily.

Deforestation rates in Brazil’s Amazonian rainforest have actually fallen by more than 75% off their recent peak in 2004, according to a report published last year by Hector Maletta, an economist at the Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires. A crackdown on illegal logging and designating 273,000 additional square miles as protected areas have helped, he says. But the real rates are even lower, he says, because much of the land being chopped at the edges was already cut down once and has since grown back. “A significant part is taking place on the re-grown forest that has been deforested twice,” he says. “So the net change is about one-half or two-thirds as much” as the official figure.

Once you factor in reforestation, the carbon sink of the world’s forests practically doubles from a third of all human emissions to 60%. While Maletta says deforestation in the Amazon will never fully cease, although he does believe the net change will continue to shrink, the world’s forests may grow back faster than our need to chop them down.

» Continue reading...

(Originally published at FastCompany.com on August 1, 2011.)

1. Attack Of The Drones

Last month, NATO’s commanders in Libya went with caps-in-hand to the Pentagon to ask for reconnaissance help in the form of more Predator drones. “It’s getting more difficult to find stuff to blow up,” a senior NATO officer complained to The Los Angeles Times. The Libyan rebels’ envoy in Washington had already made a similar request. “We can’t get rid of [Qaddafi] by throwing eggs at him,” the envoy told the newspaper.

The Pentagon told both camps it would think about it, citing the need for drones in places like Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, where Predator strikes have killed dozens this month alone. So why doesn’t NATO or the rebels do what Cote d’Ivoire’s Air Force, Mexican police, and college student peacekeepers have done—buy, rent, or build drones of their own? The development of deadly hardware and software is leading to a democratization of war tech, which could soon mean that every army—private or national—has battalions of automated soliders at their command.

“Drones are essentially flying—and sometimes armed—computers,” the Brookings Institution noted in a paper published last month. They’re robots who follow the curve of Moore’s Law rather than the Pentagon’s budgets, rapidly evolving in performance since the Predator’s 2002 debut while falling in price to the point where Make magazine recently carried instructions on how to launch your own satellite for $8,000.

“You have high school kids competing in robotics competitions with equipment that 10 years ago would have been considered military-grade,” says Peter W. Singer, author of Wired for War and a senior fellow at Brookings, who predicts robots on the battlefield will be a paradigm-shifting “revolution in military affairs.” First comes the high-tech arms race with China, Israel and all the other nations competing to build their own drones. Then comes the low-cost trickledown into low-tech wars like Libya’s, where tomorrow’s rag-tag militias fight with DIY drones. Finally, if robots are simply computers with wings (and missiles), then expect to see future wars fought by the descendants of flash-trading algorithms, with humans as anxious bystanders.

» Continue reading...

(Originally published at FastCompany.com on July 14, 2011.)

1. The Strategic Pork Reserve

Since Deng Xiaoping, China’s leaders have been obsessed with “food security” the same way America’s are haunted by not having enough oil. And as Chinese diets become more meat centric, fears of the dangers in the fluctuation of pork prices led China to establish a top-secret “strategic pork reserve” in 2007, the only one of its kind. But maintaining all those pigs has led to a massive dependence on corn and soybean imports for animal feed, which in turn is leading China’s agribusinesses to fan out abroad in a quest to control the means of production. China’s attempts to control the means of production in other countries just rising out of developing world is causing tension with its natural allies, and could be just the first step in an ever-escalating series of resource-based conflicts.

In 2006, a fatal outbreak of PRRS (aka porcine blue-ear disease) devastated China’s swineherds, killing millions of pigs. The losses comprised just a tiniest fraction of its total herd of 660 million—more than the next 43 largest producers combined—but even the slight shortfall led to soaring pork prices a year later. Hence, the pork reserve, which would allow Beijing to move quickly to keep its citizens in ribs should there be another interruption in production. 

China’s strategic pork reserve is the direct consequence of an emerging, meat-eating middle class and a government determined to feed them. As the sociologist Mindi Schneider points out, Deng’s economic reforms in the late 1970s privileged industrial farms over small plots to guarantee a steady supply of cheap pork. As a result, the average citizen’s meat consumption has quadrupled since 1980, while pork consumption has doubled in the last two decades. And China’s meat packers are just getting started—only 22% of China’s pork production takes place in industrial feedlots, compared to 97% of America’s. In the future, it will always be the Year of the Pig.

» Continue reading...

(Originally published on FastCompany.com on July 7, 2011.)

1. The Last Launch

If all goes according to plan today [Friday], the Space Shuttle Atlantis will lift off on the Shuttle program’s 135th and final mission in 30 years. As NASA—working with a drastically reduced budget—retools for a different kind of mission and private companies take over the bulk of space flight, what happens next is anyone’s guess: space hotel chains? Asteroid mining? A carbon footprint so high it single-handedly melts a tenth of the polar ice caps?

(For the complete slideshow, visit FastCompany.com.)

(Originally published at FastCompany.com on June 30, 2011.)

1. Revenge Of The Electric Car

One day in late 2005, after losing yet another bruising political battle to the bean counters inside General Motors, then-vice chairman “Maximum” Bob Lutz heard of a startup called Tesla Motors intending to bring an all-electric sports car to market. Enraged that a bunch of Silicon Valley gearheads could do what he couldn’t, Lutz, in his own words, “just lost it.” He rallied his fellow car guys within GM to develop the prototype of what became the Chevrolet Volt—the “moon shot” justifying the company’s survival and the first in a new wave of electric vehicles just beginning to break on dealers’ showrooms. And while the Volt uses just a tiny bit of gas, it’s still powered by a material that is in short supply and controlled by some of the most hard to deal with governments in the world. Its lithium battery might just create a new geopolitical calculus that is just as problematic as the gas-based one electric cars are supposed to extricate us from.

In his new book, Car Guys vs. Bean Counters, a triumphant Lutz mockingly recalls Toyota’s reaction to the Volt’s unveiling in January 2007. “Toyota immediately labeled Volt a clever but meaningless PR exercise, using a battery chemistry, lithium-ion, which was dangerous, unreliable, and far from ready for automotive use. How much sounder, they trumpeted, was their own homely little Prius using (now eclipsed) nickel metal hydride batteries.”

Toyota was wrong. The lithium at the heart of the Volt’s battery is now the gold standard for new electric cars everywhere. But is there enough of the silvery soft metal to eventually power a billion automobiles, and can we mine it fast enough? Or are we trading one finite resource for another? And in doing so, will we also trade our allegiance from OPEC to OLEC—the “Organization of Lithium Exporting Countries?”

» Continue reading...

(Originally published at FastCompany.com on June 23, 2011.)

1. The Great Melt.

In August 2007, a robotic Russian sub planted a titanium flag on the seabed at the North Pole, an act dismissed as a PR stunt by diplomats in Ottawa and Washington until Russian bombers promptly resumed Arctic patrols for the first time since the Cold War. A few weeks later, the U.S. National Ice Center reported that the fabled Northwest Passage was open and ice-free for the first time in history, theoretically shrinking the distance (and costs) between Asia and Europe by as much as 25%, presuming Canada was willing to let ships use it. The prospect of a Northwest Passage open to commercial traffic could cause a massive shift in the world’s trading lanes, drive sovereignty-obsessed nations to militarize the Arctic, and eventually watch in horror as resource-rich Greenland and Quebec raise the cash (and armed forces) to become the North’s breakaway republics.

The Arctic lost nearly half its icepack in summer 2007, alarming climatologists while causing the North’s governments to salivate. The Russian Ministry of Natural Resources calculates the Arctic might contain twice the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. The contours of the race to “carve up” the Arctic were revealed in the latest batch of leaked WikiLeaks cables released last month. “The twenty-first century will see a fight for resources, and Russia should not be defeated in this fight,” Russian Ambassador to NATO Dimitry Rogozin was quoted as saying in a 2010 cable. “NATO has sensed where the wind comes from. It comes from the North.”

» Continue reading...

(Originally published at FastCoDesign.com on April 27, 2011.)

When Droog, Diller + Scofidio, and a slew of designers and artists set out to re-imagine the American suburb—specifically Levittown, the most pre-fab of them all—the results were as surreal as you might expect: a “domesticity museum” charged with preserving a dying way of life; a backyard farm with a take-out window, even an “Attention Clinic” catering to all your narcissistic needs.

There were just a few of the homes on display as part of “Open House 2011,” a collaboration between Droog Lab—an offshoot of the Dutch design collective—and the architects of Diller Scofidio + Renfro aimed at reimagining the American suburb as a hive of bottom-up entrepreneurial activity, no new buildings or infrastructure required. By running businesses out of their homes, suburbanites could simulate New York City’s thriving informal service sector of dog walkers, take-out deliverymen, dry cleaners, nail salons, and livery cabs which provide New Yorkers with mobility-on-demand or laundry-on-demand, rather than requiring they own cars and washing machine—the classic suburban model.

“What we think, from looking at New York City, is that this model might be outmoded,” said Diller Scofidio + Renfro partner Charles Renfro at a Saturday morning symposium on the project in Tribeca. “Why not allow people to be in charge of their own futures? As a first step, we thought these residents could be motivated to find their inner service providers,” which led the team to Levittown. “Anybody can be a service provider, and anybody can opt into a service,” at least in New York.

“If you revive suburbs in this way, with a bottom-up approach, you do not need big investments,” explained Droog director Renny Ramkers. “You don’t need to add buildings, you just let the people do it themselves. So it doesn’t cost money, but on the contrary, generates earnings.”

On Saturday, this thinking produced PS 72, “the Porch Side School,” a for-profit charter of sorts mounted in the driveway of 72 Knoll Lane. As a dozen or so architectural tourists took their seats on wooden bleachers constructed by the architecture firm Austin + Mergold, principal Phyllis Dalton (a real one) led her impromptu class through a pair of lectures on the quintessentially American middle-class topics of Hummel-collecting and photobooking. Afterwards, a tip jar was passed around (proceeds were donated to charity), students drank ice tea and received graduation certificates.

» Continue reading...

What I did on my summer vacation (if you can call May-September and beyond a summer vacation) was re-imagine the future of suburbia and public housing for the upcoming Museum of Modern Art exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. I was honored to be asked by Jeanne Gang of Chicago’s Studio Gang to join her team pondering new possibilities for Cicero, Illinois – a classic inner-ring suburb whose ethnic composition has gradually changed from all-white to predominantly Hispanic, nearly half of whom are foreign-born Mexicans. This is not your typical suburbia, in other words – although one thing the five teams are discovering is that there is no such thing as a “typical suburbia.”

The exhibition isn’t scheduled to open until January 2012, but the next public symposium will be held at MoMA PS1 on September 17, and you can follow along on the exhibition’s blog. Working with a team of amazing people to transform the American Dream is a lot more fun than writing a book about neoliberal globalization, to say the least.

(Originally published in the May 2011 issue of Fast Company).

BY OFFERING luxury service (even in coach) and low operating costs, three Middle Eastern airlines—Emirates, Etihad Airways, and Qatar Airways—have become the fastest-growing global aviation market. Their location gives them an advantage, as roughly 4 billion people live within an eight-hour flight radius of the Middle Eastern cities where the airlines are based, making Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Doha logical stopovers.

Since 2000, the number of flights and destinations the companies offer has multiplied exponentially. (Etihad Airways did not even exist 11 years ago.) The growth of the airlines’ respective networks, from China and India to Africa, South America, and the United States, also mirrors the tighter economic ties between regions. Chinese exports to the Arab world have soared over the last decade, from $6 billion to $60 billion. Here, Fast Company shows the expanding reach of the three Gulf carriers from 2000 to 2010.

In the current issue of The New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann takes stock of the recent(-ish) crop of urbanism books, alternately praising and dismissing Richard Florida, Edward Glaeser, Joel Garreau, and John Kasarda as too boosterish and dogmatic, while saving his kindest words for Arrival City author Doug Saunders (who wrote a truly mind-opening book) and… me. Aerotropolis is “an odd, fascinating new book,” Lemann writes, odd because of its schizoid personality, and fascinating when seen through my eyes. As he adds later:

The second book contained within the covers of “Aerotropolis” is Lindsay’s, and it is an enthralling and only intermittently dogmatic tour of some of the gigantic, no-context sites that globalization has created, such as the all-night flower auction in Amsterdam that gets roses from Kenya to Chicago before they’ve wilted, the FoxConn factory in China where iPods and iPhones are made, and the mega-hospital Bumrungrad in Bangkok, which performs cut-rate major surgery on the uninsured from all over the world. You can get some feeling for the bizarreness of this new world from Lindsay’s description of New Songdo: “an English-speaking island stocked with prep schools from Boston, malls from Beverly Hills, and a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus… New Songdo cherry-picks the signatures of universally beloved cities and recycles them as building blocks. The city trumpets itself as an amalgam of New York, Venice, and Savannah.”