Post #3 for Kate Marolt

The presenter on Tuesday was one of the first people who have come it to talk who I really agreed with, and who made me think critically about several assumptions I have about the world. He also went into depth about this idea of complacency within the green movement, something that I had been thinking about in terms of recycling and mentioned in my last blog post. His questioning of the LEED certification model also gave me a lot to think about. My sophomore year I was a Chicago quarter mentor for the class Green Chicago, and we talked a lot about LEED certification and visited the green building on North Avenue just past Damen. At that time it seemed incredibly revolutionary and amazing (and in many ways still is), but I never have really questioned if that is enough, or even the best solution. When Edward told us that LEED certified buildings only perform marginally better than 'normal' buildings, as well as the fact that the use of the building might actually be a lot more important than the ranking it receives based on a universal checklist. We have a tendency to stick with what works, and of course the LEED system is better than nothing, but just because it is a good idea and a step in the right direction doesn't mean that it is the end; in fact, I feel as if it is a very basic step in the right direction, a preliminary idea that will hopefully lead to better ideas, ones that start creating new systems rather than working within the same tired system.

I also think that the commitment to the understanding that our lifestyle will have to change is important if we are going to be able to begin to think of ways to create new systems. No matter how we look at it, society is going to have to start thinking of new ways to live and new ways to conceptualize space and ourselves within space. As hard of a question as it was, asking what we want to change first, rather than what do we have to change, is a much better way of looking at the world rather than applying fix-ups in patches to the current system. The next step seems to me to continuously try and conceptualize a world very different than our own, without thinking about boundaries or realities at the moment.

The critique of our texts was also very important, and something I believe to be critical to education and analysis- these books are both great, but it is necessary to look at the underlying ideologies of the authors or the message the books are trying to get across. There are a lot of great ideas in there, which is the first step, but no real steps toward actually having a lot of the things mentioned come about. Even in Massive Change, when talking about a lot of the new technologies, they still exist mainly in laboratories and in isolated situations. What is it going to take to successfully conceptualize, create, and implement ideas that will subvert our current system into something new, unthought of, and self-sustaining?