I am going to continue from where Dr. Maya left and I am going to add a few more points just to share some ideas, some perspectives and maybe appeal to both your intelligence as well as your hearts and maybe get your views towards the end ok. So let us get right into the topic. This is the outline and outline slide will keep repeating as we cover sections. Probably Dr. Maya might do more justice to this but let me just repeat what you probably already know is that in nature we have many interactions, there are the various segments of nature and within each segment we have interactions for example within the atmosphere there is a lot of chemistry that happens, a lot of material flows that are happening but the atmosphere is again interacting with the hydrosphere and the hydrosphere is interacting with say the lithosphere and so on and so forth. There are interactions within each of the segments of the environment and there are interactions across the segments. So you may wonder why so many interactions are there and it actually works out in our favor. It is observing such an interacting dynamic process that one scientist by name James Lovelock, how many of you have heard of James Lovelock? Ok, what do you know about him? Ok, wonderful. So you teach about the Gaia theory. Really? Ok, how many have heard about the Gaia theory? Maybe you have not heard of James Lovelock. Ok, let me tell you in brief the Gaia theory. So what James Lovelock he was an atmospheric scientist and he was working for NASA. There is actually by the way you could note it down for want of time I am not showing you a video. There is a video on YouTube called Gaia the Sacred Balance. Ok, it is just a 3, 4 minute or maybe 2, 3 minute video which will kind of explain his perspective. So he was working with NASA and in order to find signs of life on different planets. Now you cannot go to the planets to see whether there is life or not. But what you have is you have spectroscopic information. So how looking at the atmospheres from spectroscopic information you can infer what is the composition of the various planetary atmospheres and how do you infer from the planetary atmospheres whether life exists on that planet or not. So as he was studying he actually contrasted you know for example the atmosphere of Venus and atmosphere of the earth. Now the earth has so much of oxygen. Now that oxygen for the elemental distribution in earth the oxygen so much of free oxygen is probably not the lowest energy state. It is better off for that oxygen to oxidize the carbon and maybe some minerals and things like that and the atmosphere of the earth should have been more like Venus.  So anyway, so looking at the earth's atmosphere contrasting it against the atmosphere of Venus you can immediately come to know that the earth is very different and what is it that is different in the earth, what is making that difference? The difference is made by life. At the first level let us say it is photosynthesis of plants that is leading to this kind of an atmosphere. So and if you go deeper into it you will realize that it is not only the plants and the atmosphere but the plants are again so you have the biosphere already when you talk about plants and you have the atmosphere and you have the hydrosphere and you have the lithosphere and there are these sophisticated interactions very similar to what happens in an organism. In an organism you have the respiratory system, digestive system, nervous system all of them are working to keep the organism alive. This is a unique characteristic where all of them kind of harmonize they work towards a common goal of making that organism survive. So this is what kind of James Lovelock kind of thought that the earth could be considered as a living organism similar to a living organism whether the earth is a living organism actually or not is not the discussion of this talk but he said that it is very similar to a super organism okay and he called this super organism with all these intricate systems behaving as if they had a common purpose as if okay as if being the operative word and he called it as Gaia and Gaia is the Greek goddess earth. We live in India so probably and we already have a similar concept we have our Bhumata Bhumadevi so we could equivalently think of it in that way. So it's actually a very nice thing to think of it in that way because if we had to maybe guess what that purpose was when you talk about an organism the purpose of an organism is to remain alive right the all the systems the digestive respiratory systems and all that what are they working towards they're working towards keeping us alive. So if we were to assign a similar purpose to the earth I'm not saying that there actually is or should be a purpose but what I'm saying is if we were to imagine what that purpose is it would be to perpetuate life-friendly conditions. So that kind of completely changes our outlook towards how we look at the earth that kind of places into context how our behavior should be to the earth so our behavior should naturally not be in conflict with these systems because they are beneficial to us they are what sustain us so I think implicitly all of us understand that but this is kind of a very very nice perspective that he has given that's why I kind of put this slide and we saw that due to various reasons our present development or the way we live on the earth is not sustainable and Dr. Maya showed us very beautifully how our ecological footprint actually exceeds the earth bio capacity as I was sitting there I had a question suppose I have a bottle and that has 250 ml of water I say that somebody drank 500 ml out of it how is that possible you're saying you have one earth and you're saying that we are consuming 1.5 earths how's that possible does anybody know how many thought that there is a contradiction no one thought that there is a contradiction when only one earth exists and we are consuming 1.5 times you understood my example I have a bottle of water how can I consume one and a half bottles of water it's not possible you realize that but then nobody brought it up that time you didn't think it was important look now you have to very clear perspective about the research you have one type of resource which is renewable in nature and another type which is non-renewable in nature I don't want to go into that detail so this is the perspective with time and the definition of the resources types of resources you have to think about it what she told she correctly told with a time perspective sir as we consider the earth we only consider the surface area all these things if you go for the vertical development then it may be for the 1.5 to 2.5 like that it will be no I am not sure I get that sir one earth is there yeah and we demand for the three so if we consider only the surface so one earth is sufficient to live but when we demand for the three and four and like that 1.5 so we can go for the development in the vertical manner okay it's fine his answer is actually accurate the non-renewable part okay so the there is part of the resources that get regenerated so that is the earth's bio capacity and there are non-renewable resources which over human timescales do not get regenerated maybe over geologic timescales they may be regenerated but that doesn't really benefit us correct so our our timescale yeah so in that sense it is not renewable and we are we are using that say in in a business it might amount to like an equivalent would be you know to spending your capital okay so so these are the various trajectories that we may follow if we go on this way I'm not saying that those kinds of consumptions are achievable that we may actually get there probably something may may collapse even before that so this actually shows you know if we go on just the way we are we might end up consuming nearly three earth's worth of resources by 2050 but if we take some steps to reduce our consumption then we may actually go back to what we where we should be okay living within our means so at this point you know I'm a doctor Maya mentioned about a carbon calculator similarly there are there are many websites where you can have like your entire ecological footprint also mapped out I personally prefer this excel sheet and this is hyperlinked you could click that and download but this makes a very nice assignment if we had time in the class and if we had terminals each person had a computer right now it would have been very interesting to do the reason I like this is this is an excel in an excel form where you know everybody can use excel and it the granularity of the information is much better than some of the web based calculators so in other words here you can actually even for instance it will ask you a number of questions about you know how much food you consume and what shopping you do and things like that but even within the food whether you consume vegetables or which vegetables in what quantity and whether you which food grains and things like that you can actually put quantities on that for your entire family so there is a proper assignment for that with the instructions and all that it will be shared it will be we'll put it up on some kind of a platform where you can access it detailed instructions will also be there and you could choose this one or any others you know there are web based calculators also so whichever depending on your constraints and your choice so this makes a very good assignment but what have the additional thing that I've added to this assignment is not merely calculate your ecological footprint because what we see here is that we are living beyond our means how do we get back to living within our means so you actually what I tell my students is you download two of the same excel sheet two copies of the same excel sheet and one is your current you fill out the data in one sheet which is I call it footprint 100 that is 100 percent what is your current ecological footprint you fill out actual values of how many miles you travel and how much food you eat as a family and then divided by the number of members in the family and all that and thus in the second sheet you think of aggressive steps to reduce your ecological footprint to 50 percent of whatever it is let us say it is three hectares your you living as a member of your family your per capita footprint is three hectares how can you reduce it to 1.5 so why is it important to consider you as part of your family because you know we are talking to students so the student will say that I don't drive a car but your dad drives the car right so for the family whatever how many miles he covers is is distributed among the family members okay so you can write the number of people in your family and the measurement units whether you want to work with metric or us you could first choose that then the number of people in your household things like that percentage of food that is eaten in your house and wasted and stuff like that veggies potatoes bread rice cereals it's in pounds because I think dollars metric let's put metric okay do you observe that this got changed to kgs so there is a screen tip over here so in case you are not aware how much your family consumes there is some rough estimate that is given over there you could use that and again the that is probably relevant for America it may not strictly apply so you have to use a little bit of discretion I suggest that the teachers first go through it calculated for their own family do the assignment first before giving it out to your students so you know where the pitfalls are there are some places where you can actually you know misunderstand and write the wrong value and then you'll get some really really exorbitant numbers you know anyway so this talks about the food and all then you have housing you know what is the what is the area of your house and stuff how much energy you use so there are subtotals for each then transportation so how many miles by car taxi and things like that what are the goods that you purchase we are going to see in another topic where the goods consumer goods that you purchase actually have an impact on the environment because it's only because of your demand that things get manufactured and when things get manufactured it means the raw materials have to be extracted and the waste is also generated because you know whatever you you consume after your consumption you discard anyway so you go through all that and this also talks about somewhere there is a okay so your ecological footprint is zero because I didn't fill anything but okay let me just fill out something maybe just something see so it immediately when I fill up the values obviously 100 was too large a number that's why it came to four hectares so this is the this is the sheet so you first record your present consumption then think of the steps that you will take to reduce the consumption I'll give you an example the student comes up with a plan that I'm going to insist that my dad carpools with his friend okay my dad drives to work but his couple of his colleagues also drive to work in their own separate cars so I'm going to talk to my dad's friends and I'm going to talk to my dad and convince them that they should carpool so suddenly the miles traveled by car reduced by four I mean get divided by four or that you know that I'm going to convince my family that we do not use the air conditioner instead of that you know we'll get a cooler dessert cooler may not work in Bombay but in many places it might actually be quite a good option okay so that was one assignment which again we'll upload the material and then you can go through it so the summary of of Dr. Maya's discussion and I think from the ecological footprint discussion is that we are causing a lot of strain on the environment and which is obvious in terms of all these various problems and there is simultaneously a social crisis we have wars we have poverty we have starvation we have so many other issues that are happening terrorism and whatnot so it's kind of if you actually get out of it and look at it from without you will see that these the environmental crisis and the social crisis happen simultaneously is it possible that it's not a coincidence these simultaneous problems which are social in nature environmental in nature but there are lots of commonalities this common problem that has kind of affected all of us is called as unsustainability so it is it is an indication that the development or the way we live our lives as a society is not going to last forever we can't continue to live that way forever okay unfortunately some people even believe that development which essentially wants all people to survive at the lowest level and probably enjoy some higher comforts and luxuries and prosperity at a slightly higher level has ended up threatening our very existence so it's a very ironical situation if and there are some very serious issues which could actually threaten existence of even life on earth for example the nuclear problem if there is actually a nuclear war it would be very very serious the ozone depletion problem you know it's going to affect all life on earth fortunately that is one problem which we have humanity as a whole has taken very good steps and we might we might see the end of that problem anyway how many of you heard of this this phrase the tragedy of the commons okay could you mind explaining what I mean there are some pointers over there but you could the common term is actually for the resources which has been free from the nature to all human beings to be used that's like air and water which was free totally ultimately it has been meaning we feel it free to pollute these two resources and ultimately led to the tragedy of them okay means air or water because of the over usage and the exploitation and the pollution which is being done to that so Garrett Hardin's has written something about it thank you thank you so much so there's a there's an interesting example that he gives okay Garrett Hardin several decades ago has conceived of this idea and where he he said that the environmental crisis is nothing but a magnified tragedy of the commons now what is the tragedy of the commons he gives an example saying imagine that we are all villagers okay we are 150 villagers and we have a common grassland it is the common village resource it does not specifically belong to anybody but everybody can graze their cows on that same grassland and each of us puts one cow on that grassland to begin with okay each of us puts one one cow on that the milk is is the profit that comes out okay the profit is privately enjoyed but when one cow eats the grass the resource gets depleted a little bit right so that depletion of the resource is publicly distributed okay the profit is privately enjoyed the damage or the depletion of the resource is publicly distributed so if when such is the case the and you can there is no regulation on the on the resource there is no no no tax collected per cow that you graze on that grassland so when such is the case invariably the resource gets depleted because each person is rational he understands some basic economics he understands that if I put two cows instead of one cow my profit doubles now he understands that the grassland gets depleted but bad may they can go firstly it is a delayed consequence secondly it is distributed among everybody it doesn't specifically hurt me so saying you will keep on adding more and more cows and finally there will be a depletion of the resource which is the tragedy she gave the example of water and air and basically all resources that nature provides us they are the commons and they cannot be regulated you can regulate some things but you cannot regulate everything so and we understand some basic economics so the tragedy the unsustainability at a global level is almost unavoidable as long as we continue it this way so what we need is a different paradigm a different way of looking at development different way of approaching nature and the resources that we take from nature that is called a sustainable development in which you balance economics society and the environment so within society also we see lots of extremes there is some people so poor and some people so rich that the economic process is actually not able to remove the poverty while some people are already like you know they are living like devatas on earth so some people were talking about solutions I was reading through Professor Sethi's question they have not spoken much about solutions one thing was time constraint and I think we will be speaking on solutions in different chapters like we are going to cover water energy food biodiversity ecology separately and mainly it was due to time constraint and I think Dr. Nikhil also will throw some light on solutions sure so it's not enough to merely rant about the problems you know we we are teachers we have to give some directions to students because if we are clueless about this whole problem students are even more clueless so I think we should shed at least some light on that so what do you all think how do we solve this problem and I'm not specifically talking only about air pollution or water pollution or one such problem I'm talking about that entire unsustainability including the social dimensions the environmental dimensions everything put together this whole problem this whole mess that we are in how do we solve it yes I think I actually we should start from individual level then we can just spread out to these people who are living nearby you for example class I should sensitize my student you do that for sustainable development then according that I can plan in which last year I can go about it that's the best best way to start with excellent I'm sure we are going to do that as teachers you know we are teachers we have ourselves to get convinced first and once we are convinced once we have proper direction we have to spread the good news spread the message to our students yeah I mean that's definitely the approach but do we have a good clear understanding of which direction to go how to how to solve this problem that's actually the the question what you talked about is the practical way to implement yes we will as teachers we can only do that reaching out to students sure sure sure as individuals we are citizens and we have to play our part thank you excuse me sir I want to add that we should try to implement indigenous technologies okay because if we go if we see our indigenous technologies they were totally linked with environmental conservation practices whether it is whether it is rainwater harvesting system whether it is a watershed management organic farming these all are our indigenous technologies which are linked with sustainable development thank you so much see when we see a problem suddenly our mind is clouded with a billion ideas of how to solve it okay and I've just represented some random ideas and I'm sure you could come with much a much better list than what I have over there some people think that you know that we need to stop deforestation plant more trees clean up the water the three hours and reduce waste reduce our consumption so individual action is very important yeah in in various topics we will be highlighting what are the steps that individuals we as citizens as consumers as parents as teachers what we can do okay so let me move ahead there are a number of ideas okay and if we put that long list together and if we think that that is actually going to solve the problem it's going to take us out of this mess I think we might be missing something okay I feel it may not work pause for a moment think about it all those ideas are great all those ideas will be required they are necessary but not sufficient just take a few moments to think about it okay and there are a couple of reasons there are two important reasons why they will not be sufficient a fragmented approach will never lead to sustainability a fragmented approach will never lead to anything good I feel okay maybe maybe it will lead to some good things but I don't know don't hold me on that okay and the reason as as Dr. Maya beautifully showed that egg model I have my own version I have a square egg model okay so within the environment is the human society within human society we have different institutions we have the government we have our our culture our families our economy everything is within that and now in the contemporary scenario we have some problems we have the water crisis we have the food crisis we have the energy crisis and all that so that that has some environmental aspects it kind of overlaps between society and the environment there are some environmental aspects there are some social aspects okay but what we are missing is this you see those arrows there there are interrelations just as we saw within nature there are interrelations within our problems also there are interrelations there are interrelations due to two reasons there are interrelations because the environment itself has interrelations the water bodies how did they form they form due to rain which is controlled by the hydrologic cycle which has connections with the atmosphere it has connections with the solar radiation that is coming it has connections with the hydrosphere right so there are interrelations in nature therefore our problems associated with those aspects of nature also have interrelations moreover there is one very important common factor between all social problems and environmental problems what is that the human being man-man problems okay that is social problems man environment problems environmental issues okay so man is the common factor so maybe somebody talked about an attitudinal change so if you have the wrong attitude you know you will go go mess with your colleagues in the office you will go mess with the guys on the streets and get beaten up and you will cause environmental damage also so if there is something wrong in the man the way he thinks okay I don't think there's anything very drastically wrong in our physical structure we are probably good we are nature's best product we take pride in that but I think what we are talking about is attitude okay so if we understand that unsustainability is actually a systemic problem and that it is a fragmented approach will never work we will also notice that many of the so-called solutions are either too superficial or they do not consider that there are interrelations so for example how could you ever imagine solving the food crisis of the country without solving the water crisis do you know how much of the water we extract is used for agriculture in this country yes more than 85 percent one report I read it says 87.5 I don't know if you can be that accurate but yeah it's 80 plus percent so how can the food problem be solved if you do not solve the water problem if you do not simultaneously solve the energy problem and the population problem and the poverty so how many issues are linked so you cannot solve in a sense if it is a systemic problem what I'm what I'm hinting at is that these are probably again let me use the word probably otherwise I will have slippers thrown at me or something like that we are only looking at the symptoms maybe there is a common disease okay I'll just I will just say this much and leave it at that because towards the end I'm going to tie that thread again okay so don't don't ask questions about that for now so now with this additional information how do we attain sustainability everybody in the feedback has written give us some solutions give us some solutions what are the solutions so now I'm asking you what are the solutions okay I'll tell you what are non-solutions many companies are actually doing what is known as green wash have you seen green wash do you know what is eye wash so green wash is green eye wash okay they are basically cheating they're using advertising it is all dishonest advertising and they are claiming to be sustainable they will make some minor changes to their process or something like that they increase process efficiency by a 5% and they are claiming now we are a sustainable company we are a thermal power plant okay we introduced desulphurization of the gases exhaust gases and now we are a sustainable power making company so what happened to the co2 so you stopped emitting co2 is it so this is green wash you can't make claims like that some people think that if we progress economically everything will magically get solved I don't think anybody in this audience is ignorant enough to think that way it does not solve things simply pursuing the GDP is not going to help and we just saw that fragmented or disconnected efforts are not going to yield sustainability okay and the example that I give is an orchestra if you take a bunch of musicians give them different instruments and ask them okay now let's have an orchestra each one plays whatever he wants however he wants what will be the end result everybody will rush out of the room it will be noise right if you have to if you have to generate good music out of that there are some some requirements they must agree to play a common composition at least one person who is the conductor he should have the comprehensive view top to bottom of who when the violin is going to start when the tabla is going to start when it is going to stop what should be the speed when the vocalist will start okay he has to have a comprehensive picture and the musicians should all agree to follow the directions of that one conductor right so then you can have very good music you can have satisfaction of good music so similarly in in sustainable development we require some consensus some agreement there should be some experts who should have a comprehensive picture right but maybe we are getting there it's it's not all there but there are some very good developments that have happened okay what are some of the important developments that we have that our thinkers and our experts have come up with what they have understood by now is that sustainability must be designed it cannot be an automatic product of disconnected efforts I am going to show you a nice video okay it's about systems thinking okay so I think it is pure imagination if you think that we can simply do whatever we want as long as we have good intentions and it should automatically yield sustainability it's not going to happen folks we have to design and how can we actually do that let's consider the way we manage our resources and this is a wonderful video right up there the story of stuff we were planning to show it but for want of time it's about 20 minutes I insist if you could note down the the title of that video the story of stuff there is even a website by that name and it's available on YouTube I really insist that you must show it in your class yeah yeah yeah there are see there is the story of stuff project if you go to their website there is story of stuff there is story of bottled water story of cap and trade story of cosmetics there is the story of change which I believe after the story of stuff it is best to show the story of change as she rightly said so that's very nice even the one on cosmetics and all that is really interesting not only for ladies for men also we also use a lot of cosmetics so what Annie Leonard is the is the person who was actually produced that video so what she explains is we are running a linear system on one end we have resource depletion on the other end we have waste accumulation so this is the the model of how we run our resources of this planet and obviously I think it's common sense understanding that this system cannot last forever because you're going to deplete resources at this end and you're going to create waste and pollution problems at the other end so this is an a classic example of an unsustainable system what we really need to do is to kind of circularize it okay cyclize this system into where the the waste products actually end up being future raw materials and this is this is in the direction of sustainability now if we look at our conventional homes you will see that we we actually operate a linear system okay on the left hand side we have various inputs like I am sorry you can't see it but this is like your LPG your cooking gas electricity water it comes in one way resources from the nature the reason they are red these boxes are red is because they are damaging the environment the extraction of those resources is damaging the environment so you have red over here and on the other side you generate waste so it's red over there in the other other side okay so this is how we run our house but we could run it this way so if we people talked about the three hours so using those three hours we could segregate the waste we could recycle whatever is recyclable and this actually is quite an interesting way to some people have actually conceived of even getting rid of our sewage you know through a biogas plant it actually generates fuel for you and then if it is integrated it's not like you only require fuel you also require milk so who gives milk cows give milk and cows need something to eat and a lot of the vegetable matter from your kitchen is actually good cow food so it could go there so if you have this synthetic approach rather than disconnected understanding of dairy farming and of water management and of solid waste management as different isolated entities if you have a connected synthetic approach where you understand the whole thing to be potential parts of a system you could actually rig up such a system and such things have actually been practiced if I get an opportunity I will show you some beautiful videos of how some people have actually done it you may say it's easy to run a house that way how about industry these are two videos I am not sure how we are placed for time but this is really these are two must see videos so I will skip for now but I will just tell you in a nutshell what it actually does ok industrial ecology is the overall umbrella it's a field which is the overall umbrella under which one of the important kind of things it brings to the table is industrial symbiosis what is industrial symbiosis if you look at nature in nature there is nothing such as waste I learnt it very early when I went to the forest on nature trails I observed these langurs those black faced monkeys ok they they are wasteful eaters ok they eat little but they drop so much on the floor on the forest floor it I mean I thought as a child I thought that you know my mother scolds me when I when I you know drop food on the table and wow it must be fun to be a monkey you know they don't get scolded because even the monkey mothers are doing the same thing so they are not very they are not very efficient feeders ok if I put this problem to this very educated audience of predominantly engineers I believe you will write up a research grant to the government for I don't know millions of dollars to do research on how we can make the monkey more efficient ok how to to redesign the monkey maybe its finger something wrong with its fingers or maybe hand to mouth coordination or something like that how can we make the monkey more efficient and you will get lots of grants from the government to do that but unfortunately that's probably not the best way nature thought of it very differently the nature is the master engineer and a master engineer thought of it very differently because nature had that overall perspective there was not only the problem of the inefficient feeding of the monkey but there was also the problem of lack of proper nutrition for other herbivores like deer for instance the chital deer spotted deer ok unfortunately it cannot climb trees and so nice tasty fruits and fresh leaves they are all available up at the top and they are not accessible to the chital during the the drier months you know when the grass is green grass is not available so nature thought there is no problem the problem doesn't exist there is no need to write those grants for millions of dollars you know so the waste of one process becomes the food for the other make the chital follow the langur the langurs are going in the canopy and the chital are following it on the ground ok so it totally blew my mind when I actually saw that I actually saw that in the forest so it blew my mind man nature is really far ahead of us ok and I already had an interest in the engineering and science and all that I thought I was like I knew it all but this is really beautiful and this has been done in industry too this can be done at at the level of an industry so somebody talked about flue gas desulfurization right what do you do with that sulfur that you that you get ok out of the flue gases this is what they did at Kallenborg they they put sent it to the gypsum factory the cement factory ok they require gypsum gypsum is calcium calcium sulfate ok that's where the sulfur goes so there is no problem all you need to do is co-locate the industries you co-locate to different processes meaning you locate them close strategically close to each other you you measure their the resource flows so the resources we are talking about are not only material streams but also energy streams and then we find out how what is in what is the best manner in which they can be coupled so this was done very and this is probably the most iconic examples of industrial symbiosis which is functioning and it all started off with the power station then they use the fly ash they use the flue gas desulfurization for the gypsum and things like that ok and then the waste heat the most important thing was the waste heat let's say a thermal power plant operates at an efficiency of 30 percent 70 percent of the coal energy goes off as heat that's almost like a criminal waste right so what they thought is we are burning extra fuel in our homes it's a cold country so we are burning extra fuel in our homes to keep ourselves warm that is totally unnecessary there's so much of waste heat going there let us warm water and let us circulate warm water through insulated pipes to the city the municipal corporation and they did it so the overall resource utilization of the coal exceeds maybe 60 70 80 percent ok so now where was your initial efficiency it was 30 percent now it has certainly doubled or more than doubled so when you get a view of the entire system rather than only fragments of it so the reductionist approach as opposed to the synthetic approach so when you transition your thinking from one paradigm to another you can actually get really great solutions which you could not have conceived before you would have worked on better efficiency for the thermal power plant but maybe from 30 percent you will go to 40 percent ok you could not have imagined going to 70 percent ok so this kind of explains that in a better way there is there are many things that are that are part of such a process which is again explained in that video there is something called as life cycle analysis which is required for processes and products where from the beginning to the end to its ultimate disposal you know you you analyze the energy material flows and all that so I am going to there is a small video on that too but I am going to skip all that so these are various stages from raw materials acquisition to disposal and at various stages what are the raw material inputs what are the energy inputs what are the water inputs and what are the effects or impacts on the environment when all that is put together coupled with many other methodologies you can actually develop solutions in this new paradigm so I said sustainability must be designed so that design should kind of permeate from an overall level to even at the level of one individual product so instead of designing a product where if a small part breaks it has to be discarded it is by the way many products are intentionally designed that way read the story of stuff and just note down two words planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence watch the video and tell me what they mean planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence if you presently if you cannot watch the video there is a there is a you can read the transcript it's available on the website of the story of project so you can find it out or you can just Google it it's there on Wikipedia it's everywhere okay planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence so companies actually design products for them to break so that you will buy new products okay and some products which are perfectly fine but the trend is deliberately changed by using media is deliberately changed so that you should continue buying even when the product is perfectly functional so instead of designing in this negative manner we can design in a positive manner whereby things can be designed for disassembly also they can be disassembled the parts can go to various different streams for either recycling or reuse reuse better than recycle right things like that there many many other aspects which I'm just skipping and we can think out of the box to evolve very very nice solutions in agriculture wonderful solutions are possible so there are there are various things so for in the context of waste water energy and food if you integrate these things you can come up with very unique solutions I'm going to these are more educational okay don't don't challenge me on the practical workability and all that there are issues but just just academically try to understand and relate it to the previous concepts okay so you have food waste and you have garden waste your biomass leaves grass and all that you normally compost it and you use the compost for agriculture you generate food you think you're doing a great job yes you are doing a great job if you're doing this okay think of this okay you don't require only food if the food waste is fed to the cow part of the food waste that is cow edible is given to the cow okay the cows gut is a bioreactor which within 18 hours will convert that food to at least half of the same quantity of milk in 18 hours flat I don't think there is any other bioreactor available which within 18 hours will convert waste vegetable scraps into milk with maybe a 50 percent yield or something like that okay so you get not only did you so you got an additional product which is milk then the cow dung you know is can be put for biogas cow urine can be used for agriculture thereby agriculture productivity increases the cow in Indian agriculture has been studied and they have found synergistic benefits the they used to make these nice bio liquid fertilizers Panchagavya have you heard of that yeah so many many such concoctions are available and and that actually boosts the productivity you could also integrate it with the pyrolyzer so I'm not going into the details if energy is your has priority so you with systems thinking by by connecting various aspects such as food water energy and waste management all of that if you think of it together there are many advantages okay I know that as this system gets more and more complex it becomes less and less feasible due to high initial costs and you need skilled management so the labor that you require is skilled labor so it may not work out in the long run but definitely similarly for liquid waste treatment you have your conventional ETPs which consume energy that could be replaced by a an open wetland with with the ducks this has been done by one gentleman's see Srinivasan belonging to this organization and a a facility which had electrical bills for their ETP in the to the tune of lakhs of rupees per month he converted that into a profit of three lakh rupees per month so in net loss he converted into a profit okay because you are not only getting reclaimed water but you are getting eggs as well as this is my addition by the way he only has this much okay he has a simpler system okay so somebody nicely talked about the need for a business and society and many other factors to come together in order for sustainability to happen it is not only about technology right so I am just simply may leaving you with this statement that many simultaneous interventions are necessary so you need interventions from the side of technology many of us are engineers over here or maybe biotechnologists or whatever so some technology is definitely required but that is not all governmental policy is also very important economics is very important businesses are very important so all these factors have to come together how do they have to come together do you remember the orchestra have to come together and work harmoniously together like an orchestra not simply the businessman does his own thing and the the technologies does his own a different thing and policy makers do their own different thing it will never lead to sustainability so we need governance and policies we need businesses we need strict regulation the regulatory agencies are very important it's a beautiful video on an eco village okay there are small communities very small communities maybe the size of a village okay because at it's only at that small scale that is that it's practically implementable for now because the world is headed in a different direction if you want to do something you cannot only do it on a small scale so people get together they have common ideas they have common goals and they set up a community that generally tries to achieve self-reliance in all our resources they may have other ways also like like the economic process may be slightly different from the the mainstream so there is a beautiful eco village like that called Findhorn in Scotland there is an awesome place in India called Auroville how many of you have heard of Auroville okay so there people have actually they have implemented organic farming a forest station waste land remediation they have done their solid waste management they are doing livestock rearing they are doing everything they even have industries and businesses within on a small in a small way so the Auroville is like a kind of an eco city which has like small communities each community may have slightly different goals but generally they are harmonious okay so I won't show you that video I'd like you to think of this while you go back is it possible that there is a common root cause is it possible that all these factors which have brought about unsustainability are mere symptoms of some deep underlying cause okay and if that is the case we need two approaches the first approach is controlling the symptoms if you don't control the symptoms the patient will die because of the symptoms okay you stabilize the patient but then you have to administer the drug which will actually kill the virus or whatever is the root cause of the disease so two approaches have to be followed this is what I'm bringing that previous image again saying that there might be a common root cause and we need to think of that as a result of this kind of a thinking that there might be a common root cause people have developed different ways of questioning our way of living to the extent that we we try to redefine what we understand by human well-being okay and then you have the happy planet index quality of life and things like that the happy planet index is by the way the what they are trying to do is how can you get well being of a certain level at a minimal environmental cost at the smallest ecological footprint so the footprint kind of goes in the denominator so that's the that's the beauty of the happy planet index anyway so be if we if we go off thinking in that direction we might even question why each and every want that we have must be satisfied by the indiscriminate use of technology is there any specific need for people to grow strawberries in a desert or in a dry place in dry place there are other things that grow so nice like your bear in Hindi you call bear Marathi bore Indian jujubee that grows without without water I have survived for two days in Sariska Tiger reserve eating bear it was winter and we didn't have any food the closest food place was seven kilometers and it was extremely cold at night so during the day we would just gorge on the bear it was like in the forest you know you have like carpets of that so awesome I mean I enjoyed those days it was a little uncomfortable in the stomach surviving only on that but it was it was a great experience though so because there is a fundamental attitudinal change that is required education becomes fundamentally essential when we try to search for the root cause I'm not going into some of my own findings which maybe it was a personal discovery may not be great nothing new but at least for me it was great discovery if you go on searching for that we find that it has something to do with the erosion of values but I would insist that we question even why the erosion of values happen and it will bring you to a very interesting spot and where you will probably if you think similar to me get a reinforcement of the fact that education is fundamentally required and moreover holistic education as professor Patak even mentioned in the morning session this is an assignment which details I can share with you how we can divide the students into different groups and first show them a video about an eco village then divide them up into into teams and say that this team is going to so this whole group the whole class your class will is going to design a sustainable living community and this group is in charge of water that group is in charge of making enough energy available for the community and that group is in charge of transportation and things like that and how you will understand in that in the interaction you will understand how they have to meet and talk with each other you cannot work in an isolated manner because if you are thinking of something you you are bound to cause a problem for the other party so they have to work together this can be very easily done on Google Docs that is what I use where I can sit at my terminal and I can watch all all the groups you know in putting data in different sections different subheadings of the document in real time and it's really enjoyable to watch them and you can actually chat with them while they are doing it and you can make comments and they can make comments you know if the if the water group is thinking of drilling too many borewells the energy group will suddenly say guy is just restricted we don't have that much energy to pump okay so you have them putting comments at each other so it's really interesting if you can charge them up enough but you'll have to show them very nice videos and motivate them and all that and if you do that this is an interesting really awesome assignment that can be done and I've tried it works great with Google Docs otherwise you can do it on paper but with paper this group cannot see what that group is working on so that's a little bit difficult but they have to walk over to them and and do it okay so that's all I had thank you so much and I know mine was a little monologous but I hope you like


Hey, thanks for providing crypto content for free to everyone. For non-tech savvy employees, is there an option to pay me in bitcoin with a simple fiat bank transaction and then have it automatically converted into bitcoin for me? Yes, however, because of the nature of such a transaction, this is going to be highly country specific. So it really depends on where you live and I don't know which country this is related to, but I can give you some insight. I know there was a service that I used a long time ago called Bitwage, B-I-T-W-A-G-E. That was at the time a U.S.-based system and what it allowed people to do is, you as an employee set up an account with Bitwage and you provide to your employer a payroll deduction that you want to make, almost like a split paycheck where they send a percentage or fix the amount from your paycheck every month to a specific bank account using a specific ACH transaction and then on the other end what Bitwage does is it immediately converts that to bitcoin and deposits it into a bitcoin address. So your employer doesn't know this is going to pay for bitcoin. They just include an extra ACH credit in your paycheck which gets diverted to Bitwage, which then gets converted to bitcoin. Obviously there is a custodial element because we're talking about fiat, meaning that at some point in time somebody else controls your money. But otherwise that works. Now there are similar services in a variety of countries. A lot of exchanges offer services like that. So did Parametric just tell us where he is based or she is based? Okay, right. So Fiat may be one of the exchanges in your country. If you're not in the U.S. they may offer a very similar service which allows your employer to convert fiat for you. The other thing you can really easily do is if you can't do that is you could set up an automatic buy on an exchange in your local country and simply time it for the day your paycheck hits or the day after your paycheck hits so that every time your paycheck comes through part of it automatically gets debited from your own account, gets converted to bitcoin and then you can withdraw it from the exchange. So that's another way you could handle that same scenario.