Adam Cohen 2018 North American Passive House Conference

By humans, insects are really individually weak, but as a group they're really powerful. They're powerful enough to shake their environment and their species. I'm sure that if insects were to be removed from our global system equation, it would have an effect. It could be a balance that would be unstruck and then have to be restructured. But the thing that I have ultimate confidence in is that the system would rebalance, because it always does. And the thing that you gotta realize is we are no different. If we're not there, it's not gonna hurt the earth at all. It's not complaining about us being here. They are just cruising on. Well, we'll keep on going. I guess I did time that one real well. It's the first one. So when an insect makes a choice, they follow a fair amount. They don't choose the way that humans choose. The bee spends its first two days alive cleaning cells, keeping the broom. The next three days it's feeding the older larvae. The next five days are producing wax, building comb, transporting food within the hive. They then spend three days guarding the hive entrance. The rest of their short 35-day life is spent visiting flowers, pollinating, collecting pollen, nectar, propolis, and water. That's what a bee does. An ant picks up a piece of leaf and carries it back to the ant nest, not because it's a choice in the way that we conceptualize a choice. They do it because there is no question. That is the choice. The pheromone directs where they're going. So I am convinced that the largest natural limitation to our species is this duality that we have, or that we had maybe have innately. There's a self-limiting and selfish intimate nature of our species, and there's also an expansive and selfless outward nature of our species. This I-we type of interaction is what prevents us from moving forward in this more integrated way where we can actually defect and successfully work as an endemic species. I hope you guys are following me and this doesn't sound like craziness. I'm gonna now do one of my favorite quotes. I got this quote two winters ago at Fred's place. I spent the night there, and my wife and I had driven up and we were parked in front of the trash cans. I didn't realize that apart from that, it was snowy. I come out and somebody put something on it: 'Don't park in front of the trash cans.' That was on the car. He never got me. But here's the thing: I turned the card over and this quote was on the car, and I've been carrying this quote at my desk for over two years, stains and all. It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn from The Gulag Archipelago. He said, 'If it were only so simple. If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who's willing to destroy a piece of its own heart?' Really powerful quote, because it brings it down to our individual responsibility in every action that we take, every thought we do, every interaction we have. It's way more easy to think 'they are bad and I am good' than 'I am both bad and good.' So in short, what we need to do is we need to evolve our hearts. That's the evolutionary step. We have these incredible minds, but we have these parts that are not able to really keep up with our potential technical prowess. Pope Francis said at the refugee crisis in Europe that until we truly learn to feel and love refugees as our sisters and our brothers, we will never move forward as a species. I never would have thought I would be quoting the Pope. The Maori in New Zealand have a word called 'Ami.' Ami means 'the people.' It's both 'I' and 'we.' I am a we. You are a we. And we are this I-we. This non-differentiation is really an important piece of what will be happening as we go forward. It's my belief that the unification of I and we will be what actually significantly reduces our burden on this planet. But, and this is the big but, only if we can outrun, or I think more appropriately, out-feel our self-limited nature, this inner self-limiting nature. So how does this work? If I knew that, it'd be great, but I'm just making observations. Regardless, I extrapolate as I think about what interactions with the earth may look like if humans were to think or act in similar ways as insects, and use that as my precedent for this theoretical future endemic species actually living on earth. There's two views I come up with. There's the scary view. In this future world, humans are atomic. They have a hive mind depicted in science fiction, working in sequence and harmony to achieve things, but without any personal choice or individuality. That's the scary view. The not-so-scary view, which is the only kind I favor, is that it's clear to me that what I do personally is that I create shelter. That's what I do. Shelter is one of those basic things like food, education, clothing, that basic stuff that me as an endemic species will have to provide, just like an anthill or a beehive provides. Except for our species, the earth is the beehive. That's how big we are. So what we need to do going forward is to understand that as you start to try to bring our minds around what it is that we do, I started thinking beyond. I'm not even beginning to deal with the result of that exponential curve. I don't care about that. I don't care how we get massive. That's way too far for how I want to think. What I want to do is know what am I going to do as a shelter maker once I get past and over this exponential hump and we pull back. What does shelter making look like in a future world where as an endemic species we are actually nurturing the system and we're actually working? That's my question. That's the question I wanted to call. What does that look like? How do I imagine the future world will look? I think that will be conceptual in our world, our societies, our economy as an optimizing system. That's one thing for sure. I don't think we're going to be putting things in places where there's a lack of resources or lack of optimization. I think on a planetary scale we will optimize, and we will produce whatever needs to be produced with the best logistics, with access to good power, access to transportation. The one thing that we've discovered, the one thing that we have definitely demonstrated in our global neoliberal society, is that we have got logistics down. In the international trading community, we have learned how to move stuff efficiently from point A to point B and how to make efficient use of our optimized, though imperfect, economic system. The thing about our current system is that it's both robust and incredibly fragile. The fragility is based on the human nature of separating into individual countries or regions or companies, whereas if we're an endemic species working together, these logistics become much more robust in that we're fighting nature rather than ourselves. So increasingly, I feel that the climate imperative will be nested in this escalation of the movement of people on a very, very large scale. I think we know that. I think we can all agree on that. We don't know how large, we don't know where, we don't know how it manifests, but we know that people will be moving in masses. We're already seeing glimpses of what is coming now. Just glimpses. Look at the people that had to leave Wilmington, North Carolina. How long in the future is this? 20 years, 100 years, 500? You have no idea. I can't tell you exactly, but I know it's on that order of magnitude. It's not very long on a planetary time scale. The way I feel about it is like the train's coming down the track. I can see the light. I don't know how far it is, but I can't get my feet off the track. So this thing is happening. Is there something else that might come along and fix it? Not sure. But once again, this is the unknown unknown. It's not worth contemplating the unknown unknown. Let's contemplate the known unknowns. So at the end of the day, I try to plug myself into this not-so-scary future. I realized that as designers and builders, we need to switch our mindsets to integrate into one system of shelter, basic coverage of needs, just like a species. And as a species affected by hurts, can ever pull a net positive to balance? We need to provide a turnkey system of shelter that can be designed, manufactured, assembled, disassembled, and reassembled as needed where needed. For now, maybe we'll just make things where it's most appropriate, make them and move them as they need to be moved in the future. Or maybe not. Maybe we just make parts and pieces that fit together. Remember, I'm thinking beyond the resolution of the exponential growth factor. So I'm trying to understand what it might look like in the future once we've gotten over where we're wasting money on things like more and multiple. So as I start to think about this future, intertwining existence, I started thinking about the planetary interconnectivity that this would mean and how that reflects on physical items. I look to a typical sci-fi thing and I get this future. So we're out in space, and we're in our ship, and our oxygen scrubbers have stopped. We find that there's an alien spacecraft drifting over here, and we die over there. We get ourselves over. Maybe our shuttle's broken, so we have to do something cool like clip ourselves or something, then open the hatch and blow our way over there, then grab on to it. It's really cool. We go into the alien ship and we're walking around, and we find their oxygen scrubber and we unplug it. Then we go back and we have to blow ourselves back the other way, but there's no air hatch. So I'm pulling myself along, and I got this thing strapped in, and I get back to the ship and I take my air scrubber and I put it in, and magically the plug meets up with mine, an alien plug. And just as we're all dying, the air comes on. That type of universal compatibility, interconnectivity, that's the future. That's where our shelter makers will go. Just because you can't see it now doesn't mean it won't happen. So what can we do today? As designers, we can take basic standardized shapes and put them together like simple blocks. This graphically simple box can be translated in a universal way to a database for manufacturers who will produce the widgets in concrete, steel, wood, fiber, any other material that we can gather. Speaking of materials, my future materials are not fossil fuel and mineral based and extractive, but they're biology based and habitable. In my mind, I'm thinking that as of today, we're not going to have a lot of difference in our materials, but in this future, through getting over the hump so to speak, I don't know what, but I wouldn't be surprised to see us growing buildings. The mushroom coated house. Sorry, technical difficulty. Backwards, upside down. I'm trying to get the cursor back on this thing. I don't know what I did. So this biology-based building materials, I could easily see us growing insulation around our ability to so we don't have to worry about energy. I just put them there, they do their thing. So how does this work? How can we implement such a concept today, prior to the resolution of the hump? How does it work today if we're thinking beyond the hump? Well, what do we want? Something really super simple. Why complicate things? We know this has been working. So why not something really simple? Why not start with a little 30 by 30 centimeter module in X, Y, and Z, and maybe make it 30 centimeter adjustable in modularity? But with this, it's connected to a database DNA that handles structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, communications, insulative values, opaque component, transparent component, anything you can think of to be put into this database. The database can be optimized with building physics and optimized to talk to each other. We can then add to this, continually optimize and simplify it. So as manufacturers, designers, and contractors, we will all be sharing the same resources and modules. This will allow us to be more effective from all ends. As I manufacture and construct today, this would mean locking systems in early.