FAMOUS LAST WORDS “Design is our salation!” “Design is our salvation!”
v By Naomi Cleaver
This is how I signed off when I had the honour of presenting the Brit Insurance Design Awards at the Design Museum last year, and rather jaunty I thought I sounded too, until I read in a certain well- known design publication that what I considered my “call to arms” they described as a “platitude”.
Well, I guess they have a point, especially after the self-righteous, Communist-style “Hope” poster by Shepherd Fairey for the Obama presidential campaign predictably won top prize.
But I desperately do believe that good design (instead of good packaging and marketing) is the solution to all our ills for the very simple reason that good design is problem solving: it is the process by which we identify a problem, and even the problems behind the one immediately in front of us, analyse the issues and then evaluate the resources available to us so we can develop, and ideally perfect, a solution that provides maximum benefits with minimum disruption; a process that is no stranger to the environment industry. (And a process that is at the heart of my new book, “The Joy of Home”.)
But when it comes to the discourse on our environment, I am always baffled by the near total absence of any discussion on the control of human population, for this is the really BIG problem for our environment; carbon emissions, pollution and the destruction of natural habitats are mere symptoms of this much greater ill.
When asked to write this piece I first thought that I’d write about making our homes more environmentally sustainable, an issue I care about, not because I’m an eco-warrior (I enjoy bathing too much) but because I have always believed that great design is about the most effective use of resources. I am also desperate to liberate the issue of sustainable housing from left-brained boys who present solutions as simply more machines for living in, all bland sheets of glass, timber frames and heat pumps - rather than gorgeous and intriguing homes that just happen to operate efficiently too. It’s beautiful buildings that are the most enduring. I blame Grand Designs.
There is also the small matter of the financial un-sustainability of environmentally sustainable methods of energy generation, at least when it comes to retro-fitting, a fact I am only too aware of as I renovate my own 1968-built home.
But I’ve come to suspect that any discussion on living sustainably is just a lot of hot air (which we can ill afford in all sorts of ways) without a brutally honest discussion on population control.
But of course there is an enormous reluctance to grapple with this subject, given the associated whiff of eugenics. Thankfully the great Sir David Attenborough, who knows more about the planet than most, has raised his head above the parapet and is championing the Optimum Population Trust, which campaigns for reducing population growth in the UK, as well as abroad.
Another inspiring organisation is the imaginative charity Blue Ventures (
www.blueventures.org), who corral science and medicine to improve the lot of coastal communities around the world. This from the Blue Ventures website:
“In the remote coastal
regions.....access to sexual and reproductive health services is even more difficult. As a result, some girls as young as eleven have had children, and women are having up to 16 children. Infant and maternal mortality figures are high. The rapid growth of coastal populations, whose doubling time is approximately 10-15 years, poses a severe threat to the future
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sustainability of the country’s extensive coral reefs and other marine habitats, upon which the livelihoods, culture and future economic wellbeing of coastal communities depend.”
But it is not just vulnerable women and children in countries thousands of miles away who present a risk to the environment. The Optimum Population Trust notably identify the UK’s shamefully high teenage pregnancy rate as one problem that is a real threat to sustainably managed resources.
A few paragraphs back I wrote about the first part of the design process being identifying the problem, or perhaps the problem behind the problem.
Well here we have the problem, behind the problem, behind the problem. Female disenfranchisement is arguably the greatest threat to a sustainable planet and a fissure in human society of deeply shocking proportions in the 21st Century.
Studies have shown that giving women access to contraception and sexual healthcare isn’t simply a matter of education: it is a matter of female emancipation.
In developing societies even educated women are sexually exploited and as a result produce children they would not have had if they had been given a choice, or at least that choice was culturally acceptable. (And I speak with experience as I have recently been living in a country where the more children a man has with as many different women he can, the more admired he is – and the women, heartbreakingly, buy into this dangerous nonsense, not least because many are, ironically, dedicated evangelical church-goers, where American “pro-life” dollars pay for nice big fat churches while the nation’s schoolchildren struggle to study with insufficient books and generally execrable teaching.)
British women, like some of our teenagers, are equally sexually exploited, seduced not just by their spotty teenage boyfriends but by the glamorisation in “celebrity” magazines of gratuitous sex (I don’t think there’s anything wrong with gratuitous sex, by the way - there’s just no need to glamorise it, or even go on about it) and the cute little babies born with little provision of a stable home; where some of our girls feel so hopeless about their prospects that burdening themselves with otherwise fatherless and under- resourced children is their best career move, especially when our bloated welfare state (even after the cuts), and crucially the environment, will pay.
If design is our salvation then this designer says we desperately need a feminist revolution if we have any hope of saving Mother Earth.
The hand that calls a halt to unsustainable population growth saves the world.
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