Part 5 - The Yellow Emperor’s Spell is Broken

 The Bioshaft® Design Process – what is it and how it came to be?

Part 5 - The Yellow Emperor’s Spell is Broken

 In ancient Chinese mythology the Yellow Emperor is the one that imprisoned Chaos in a mirror so that humans could enjoy a peaceful and predictable existence. He is the bringer of civilization and discovery. The myth of the Yellow Emperor was back in my thoughts. I had returned from California and found the situation in Chicago quite chaotic. After the initial surprise of the great financial meltdown of 2008, the truth began to emerge. A remarkable few, unscrupulous individuals had managed to topple the world economy. This did not happen in a month or a year but was the product of unbridled corrupt system of predatory capitalism. The State of Illinois was prosecuting its fourth Governor that would end up in prison, Chicago was facing new scandals and many jobs had vanished. The spell of the Yellow Emperor was being undone as predicted in the myth. The image of the mirror as a passage to an unfamiliar world has been a common theme in fairytales and now had become a reality. The image we had created of ourselves in the reflection we saw in the mirror had deceived us. Like Narcissus we were spellbound by our own reflection and failed to notice what was happening to the world around us. The global market intended to create an ordered equitable system had been turned into a weapon that only benefitted a few powers and left the rest of humanity stranded in its wake. The fix was in to the point that stock market outcomes were manipulated by algorithms capable of thousands of transactions per second and had no connection to reality or moral values that even those who claimed professional competence could not tame. The welfare of the community was under siege by the welfare of corporate entities that had surrealistically obtained the status of persons. Outside of the anthropocentric sphere the situation was even more desperate, sustainable life processes had reached a breaking point in dire need of resuscitation. In 2009 I found myself starting all over again. In fact my thoughts made a complete circle back to my master thesis research when I first came to know the myth of the Yellow Emperor in the book Turbulent Mirror by John Briggs ad F. David Peat (1989).

In 1990 I defended my master thesis at the landscape architecture department, University of Guelph. I had become fascinated by Chaos Theory and the Game of Life and incorporated the inherent stochasticity and cellular automata into a computer model for a dynamic simulation of groundwater movement in the vadose zone, (the unsaturated areas of soil strata). Apart from my thesis supervisor Dr. Robert Brown, Department of Landscape Architecture and Dr. John Holbrook at the Department of Pure Math who had been of great help in the building of the model, the rest of the landscape architecture faculty had been quite cold towards this work; they questioned its significance related to the landscape profession, preferring I had done a design-based thesis. Why would a model of water behavior in the area of the root zone of many plants be a contribution to landscape architecture? In my mind it was all pretty clear. Now (2009) twenty years later, I realized that it was at the heart of my work to build an onsite biogeochemical waste treatment system and habitat for the urban cores. The big problem of traditional engineering efforts is its reliance on linear equations where one action preceded a predictable reaction. Whereas nature cycles are fundamentally stochastic, they can be predicted only to a general trend but not to specificity. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s the Mandelbrot Set and the Julia Sets with their swirling gorgeous patterns introduced the fractal beauty of chaos to all of us. James Lovejoy’s Gaia Hypothesis (1965) was back in vogue; his revelation that life on our planet is responsible for the maintenance of a beneficial atmosphere that in turn supported life (self-sustaining) along with Biophilia (1984) the landmark book by E.O. Wilson that proclaimed a desired affiliation of humans to the web of life formed the basis of my design process. In addition the insights of Lynn Margulis had challenged the prevailing ‘survival of the fittest’ theory attributed to Darwin by demonstrating the wonderful and more numerous symbiotic relations present in nature. Lynn Margulis and E.O. Wilson would become two of my reference points in the evolution of the Bioshaft design process.

As I worked on my thesis I was particularly struck by the realization that one raindrop changes the biogeochemical properties of the soil for the next raindrop and so forth and the soil is being constantly changing due to organisms, organic content and fungi that inhabit it. The raindrops themselves a product of activity far from the land they now fell upon. This was my equivalent of Lorenz’s butterfly effect. Predicting at this level is impossible. In the end we must accept this limitation and take responsible steps that do not compromise the chaotic balance of nature. Whenever we become too confident in our abilities to control we ultimately create problems. Stochasticity must be part of the solution in a global cyclic atmospheric pattern where distant events affect local conditions. In the case of the bioshaft design, stochasticity is introduced by setting up initial conditions that allow natural processes to evolve.

I was no longer interested in yet another report for future plans. There was the Club of Rome report in the 70’s, the Bruntland Report in the 80’s, the 2010 plan, the 2020 plan, the 2030 plan, the 2040 plan and now the 2050 plan is in the works. All predicting terrible consequences if action is not taken. I wanted to arrive at a solution that could be built in place now and would not depend on whole economies changing or whole cities built or even a new building built. I envisioned it as an organ transplant; in fact my new analogy was that of the human liver. My goal became to biomimic the function of the liver and apply it to an existing building or group of buildings. My Ventura concept designs for small scale needs rather than large scale grid distribution systems were refined. This is how the earth operates; each organism contributes at a local level. If we don’t need to match the power of a large coal fueled plant or nuclear plant then alternative energy solutions should be relatively easy to achieve. The question is how small a scale is desirable that makes economic sense but above all that makes ecological sense which is in direct contrast to the smart grid solutions being promoted by the energy corporations. This small scale energy production would democratize the cost distribution. The energy production infrastructure would be the responsibility of the developer with costs including maintenance factored in. It would be fitted to that particular project and only scaled up when additional development took place. Communities would not need to bear the costs of providing these services. If subsidies are needed for large complexes such as hospitals, military bases, first response quarters and other public service facilities then it would be part of an open political choice made by the communities. But we would not be subsidizing for example a power plant’s use of water, or energy to manufacturers without knowing the full costs. At the same time waste treatment would also be designed in proportion to the development, to be dealt with on site. Point source pollution would then be identified and dealt with accordingly, not become a public burden and hazard. Large scale black outs would be avoided, only the directly connected communities would be jeopardized and speedy recovery could occur due to easily identifiable problem locations. This alternative solution would depend largely on biological systems that can become part of the overall cyclic, stochastic natural processes.