I believe that waste is a mindset.
When I was really young, my mom would often teach me a phrase,
it was called ‘kar kasar.’
‘Kar’ is from the Sanskrit root ‘kri,’
and we’re quite familiar with other words,
like ‘karma,’ that come from the same root.
‘Kar kasar’ is like being concerned.
I was a really naughty kid, and I remember that I would get detention after school,
and for that detention, the school would give me a punishment
to go around the playground and pick up litter.
I was a litter buster.
And as part of this deal of carrying a bag and an elongated arm,
I used to pick up pieces of rubbish,
and at the back of it would be: ‘Make Britain tidy.’
It had a huge impact on me.
Later on, I got a little bit better, I wasn’t so naughty at high school.
And then somehow, I made it to university,
and in my economics degree,
I started to really get deeper into the concepts
of what the scarcity of resources actually meant.
I didn’t believe in that.
It was actually only nine years later,
when I was invited to Bhutan by the Queen Mother,
that I came across a completely different measure of success
that was called Gross National Happiness Index.
And in 2011, exactly a year later,
we presented the World Happiness Report at the UN.
‘Replenish’ was a word that I kept on coming back to,
and it’s the word that I’d like to translate from ‘kar kasar’ to English.
Replenish is a philosophy;
it is a philosophy of giving more than you’re taking.
Later that year,
I was invited by the Center of Environment Planning and Technology
to collaborate with them and to do some research on smart cities –
India has a hundred smart cities, and CEPT is at the forefront of that research.
And whilst I was invited there,
there was something really bizarre about that photograph behind me.
It’s normal:
young gentleman, sitting on a bamboo, probably singing Bollywood songs
and completely oblivious to what’s behind him.
Waste is normal.
It was this that really shocked me,
and I would often see on the side of the streets
more informal landfill sites than formal landfill sites.
People would run
to new trash being delivered to landfill sites like rats.
But I had a moment, and that was in understanding
that I think we need to question the philosophy
upon which we design our existence.
This post-war mentality
of acquiring more material wealth regardless of the environmental impact
is actually at the core
of what we need to understand for future generations.
In India that moment came for me when I was in a rickshaw,
and I was sitting at the back minding my own business.
I had a scarf over my mouth because of the air pollution,
and I actually just stopped on the side, and I saw a cow,
and it was reaching down to pick up a piece of plastic,
and it was chewing the piece of plastic
because it could smell food on the plastic.
Little did I know that that moment, I would never ever forget.
It was that moment, where the cow is eating this plastic,
I realized that: how much more plastic is this cow going to eat?
Later on, I had some research done, and actually bricks of this plastic
stop the cows from digesting, and often they die.
We’d taken it way too far.
And in India, where you walk through the streets,
it really makes you wonder
what this GDP as a measure of success actually really is.
It doesn’t factor in long-term implications
or the consequences to the future availability of these resources.
93% of the coral reef at the Great Barrier
… is bleached,
and it’s not going to come back.
Almost every day, there is a species that is extinct,
and our land and oceans are filled with waste,
like this Great Pacific Gyre.
WALL-E …
Do you think he looked up at the beautiful sky at night
and wondered about, you know,
that space is congested with decommissioned satellites and debris?
(Laughs)
Probably not.
I think what’s worse
is that there’s not one person, one community, or a country
that is responsible.
And yet governments, and academics, and really reputable individuals
ignore the fact that our global commons are suffering.
We fuel mass production
and grow resource allocation as if, you know, we’ve got no care in the world,
it will keep on going.
It’s a very short-term mentality,
and it doesn’t allow us to understand the limits to our growth.
Actually, it encourages us to consume more.
By coincidence,
I was in the National Institute of Design again in 2015,
and I came across two lovely ladies, completely by chance.
We were having a conversation –
and this piece of art is part of that conversation
of landscapes and how art can impact us,
this in particular is looking at John Trumbull’s ‘Romantic Landscape’ –
what I realized was
that visual inspiration has a huge impact on us,
and our environment is actually something that can make us who we are.
So what does the visual inspiration
of these places that I see in formal landfill sites,
what are they doing to me?
I think I’ve walked through the different streets
of about 75 plus countries –
those who know me know that I travel quite a bit –
and I get inspired
when I walk through the streets of many different cities,
but in India, I was getting really depressed.
It was only till I met these women, Mudita and Ishika,
that I felt that I had some hope.
It was the beginning of the Replenish Team.
Later that year, in December, I was invited,
after the Smart Cities research at CEPT, to teach a course.
It was going to be called ‘Replenish Smart Cities’
because they wanted smart cities, and I wasn’t going to do it on its own –
what is smart in the end, right?
It was actually this pushback that I got from the students,
because I suggested we should go to Abu Dhabi;
we should go to see Masdar City; we should go to Bhutan.
And the students gathered around and said, “Ma’am, do we have to go to Bhutan?
It’s right next to our country. Can’t we go to London?”
I said, “No, we can’t go to London. I want to take you to Bhutan!”
And actually, what was really surprising
was that having seen the tallest tower in the world,
at the end of the course, the students turned to me and said
that Bhutan was the most impressive thing that they’d ever seen.
We were actually sitting in a bus.
We were coming from Paro directly to Thimphu,
and on the bus, I was kind of snoozing away,
and I just remember it halting, and I thought it was an emergency,
all the the students had run off the bus,
and once they’d run off the bus, I started to run off the bus,
thinking, I don’t know what’s happened.
Little did I know that on the little highway next to the river
the students were actually taking selfies of themselves with the clear water;
they had never seen such clean water in their lives.
This was the power of a lived experience,
something that no textbook could have taught them.
After the success of the first course, I ended up teaching a second course,
and this time I took my students to Japan.
Japan is the ideal when it comes to resource efficiency, and not just that.
I gave the students a culture shock.
I really wanted to put them into the the middle
of learning how to recycle
because they don’t do that at home in India.
And it was in Japan, when they were living in these homestays,
that they started to realize:
‘rentai sekinin’ –
‘rentai sekinin,’ in Japanese, is community responsibility.
And at the moment when they were leaving Japan –
this is another image from Iwaki,
where the students learnt about resource cycles –
and it was actually the profundity of that change around us
that suggest that we’ve really gone too far.
And perhaps navigating a different course isn’t going to be possible.
Maybe we’re going to lead to mass neurosis,
perhaps unemployment and poverty are really on the agenda.
But I don’t think this is the time for unconscious evolution,
I think it’s time that we manage this change,
and we master the multitude of futures that we have in front of us.
I’m going to ask you a question.
Thanks.
Which part of the planet is it okay for us to hide waste?
Can we put it underneath your seat?
Do you think we can put all the rubbish outside of this building,
and nobody would notice it?
Which part of the planet is it okay for us to hide waste?
Do you think waste is human?
Because we seem to treat it like that.
You know, we burn it, cremate, we bury it.
We haven’t quite figured out a way of sending it out to space,
but perhaps that’s next.
I think we have tremendous methods to distribute waste around the world.
You don’t have to go that far, just go to MIT Media labs,
and you will see Carlo Ratti’s work
on how rubbish goes from North America all the way to Thailand;
it’s really impressive.
Are we leading to a wasteland,
like Pieter Bruegel depicted in this image?
Or, can a resource be reincarnated?
About 3,000 years ago in India,
we began seeking answers to philosophical questions.
It was about 150 years ago, we turned to science.
‘Cosmosapiens,’ a book authored by John Hands,
really talks about the Big Bang theory
for the origin of the matter and energy of which we ultimately consist.
But he says it’s contradicted by observational evidence.
Cosmologists, he says, fail to account for about 95% of the universe.
The central idea is untestable and hence unscientific.
Richard Dawkins popularizes Neo-Darwinism
in his very, very famous book ‘The Selfish Gene,’
but he too is contradicted by 21st century evidence,
and he too has realized that this is a belief system that has been created.
What’s massively different about us is our reflective consciousness.
In evolutionary lineage leading to humans,
consciousness rises to the point that it becomes conscious of itself.
We’re the only known species that not only knows
but knows that it knows.
And this evolution is noetic, it’s an evolution of the mind.
It’s time that we develop a system that moves us to mindful consumption,
and yes, these ‘kabadiwalas’ in India, in scrapyards, are doing a great job,
they’re collectors, and sorters, and connectors, and traders,
and this place in Memnagar is a scrap market in Ahmedabad,
and they do a brilliant job.
Yes, there are steps.
And yes, we can really go to a place
where we can create this evolutionary step,
but I think what’s really needed is an entrepreneurial shift
to consider sustainability at the inception of a business,
as a forethought, not an afterthought.
What if we were to launch the Replenish Business Canvas –
we did so in MIT last year.
This was really to question businesses,
right at the beginning, at the startup stages,
to understand what it was that they would have an impact on in the long term.
Within about two months or so,
the Indian Institute of Management picked it up, and after that
about nine other universities under the A-league
were really excited about accelerating the theme ‘Replenish,’
and the business canvas has been used by them
through their entrepreneurship education
to raise awareness about this important theme.
I think startups will evolve to capture larger markets of demand,
to create goods and services
that will help us live in harmony with nature,
and that will lead to current businesses remaining competitive
and learning what it is that’s needed.
We need to be widely distributing
a lot of this education to teachers as well
so they can be at the cutting edge of this education in business.
In the short term, of course, we can upcycle,
we can design using circular design,
and Basarama’s playgrounds are a good example of that.
Even the Swedish, you know, importation of waste around the world
is a great example for the short term.
Perhaps a success factor is using Community architecture 2.0,
where it’s really taking understanding
from an academic research from UCL’s Institute for Sustainable Resources,
where they can actually map out ecosystem services as an index.
I think developing this will require access
to a number of different organizations,
and these will filter in that knowledge.
Yes, it’s not perfect. No.
It’s not accurate, either.
But it’s a step.
We’re asking for your support to protect the global commons
and to share the philosophy of Replenish.
In October we’re going to be at The Story Of Space –
it’s an art residency, it’s going to be in Goa,
I would love to see you there.
Actually in January this year, we launched the Replenish Speaker Series;
this is really to get an understanding
of what kind of business models have been successful,
and to inspire our audience to share those.
They do exist.
In the medium term we’ve supported rural urban development,
where, in Surat for example, we’re piloting different schemes,
to then reach out to about 300 different villages around the city,
where we can trial out different sustainable urban development.
Sean Yoro’s work is really exceptional;
it’s where he paints on, sort of, you know, these melting icecaps,
and he shows us the importance of time.
Money saved should really be put into these Replenish reserves
around the world.
And I really do think that advertising tools,
I mean, if we go back in time to Edward Bernays and his PR work,
we can really learn the kind of cultural artistic context of his work
to really begin a dialogue,
and perhaps even lead to crazy actions,
like this gentleman in China, hoovering up the air pollution.
So …
Why do we only ever add new words to dictionaries?
Perhaps it’s time we removed ‘waste.’
Thank you.
(Applause)
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