I've been reading Arnold Zwicky's language blog lately. Zwicky is a visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford and plays in the culture pool quite a bit.
In a recent post, he lamented over a forced home improvement project that included the destruction and rebuilding of part of the structure. In it, he talked about the failure of the word reconstruction to fully carry the weight of the opposite of deconstruction:
I found reconstruction a pallid word for the process of undoing demolition.
It's the "undoing" that I am interested in, specifically as it pertains to, of course, sustainability.
Is Environmental Engineering (engineering our way out of climate change) such that Stewart Brand is now advocating reconstruction of the thing we have demolished? Not quite.
How about the radical fringe green building movement of building buildings which provide the same ecological value (benefit not resource [more on that difference in tomorrow's post]) as the land they consumed - sometimes revolving back hundreds of years as benchmark. Is that reconstructing what was deconstructed? Not quite again.
I don't have any answers, but like the exploration. We have two options, though - make deconstruction more aggressive, or make reconstruction more meaningful. Perhaps what we have done is not to deconstruct our natural environment, but, as Zwicky explores in his own context, maybe moliation (to grind down) is a better word.
I think this language, has some impact on sustainability though, specifically how we talk about it going forward.
