The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us

Asphalt Jungles

Watching Budi tumbling and climbing, at play with ball and shadow and iPad alike, I marvel at the road the human race has traveled. Open your imagination to how we began—as semiupright apes who spent some of their time in trees; next as ragtag bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers; then as purposeful custodians of favorite grains, chosen with mind-bending slowness, over thousands of years; and in time as intrepid farmers and clearers of forests with fixed roofs over our heads and a more reliable food supply; afterward as builders of villages and towns dwarfed by furrowed, well-tilled farmlands; then as makers, fed by such inventions as the steam engine (a lavish power source unlike horses, oxen, or water power, and not subject to health or weather, not limited by location); later as industry’s operators, drudges and tycoons who moved closer to the factories that arose in honeycombed cities beside endless fields of staple crops (like corn, wheat, and rice) and giant herds of key species (mainly cows, sheep, or pigs); and finally as builders of big buzzing metropolises, ringed by suburbs on whose fringes lay shrinking farms and forests; and then, as if magnetized by a fierce urge to coalesce, fleeing en masse into those mountainous hope-scented cities. There, like splattered balls of mercury whose droplets have begun flowing back together, we’re finally merging into a handful of colossal, metal-clad spheres of civilization.

Among the many shocks and wonders of the Anthropocene, this is bound to rank high: the largest mass migration the planet has ever seen. In only the past hundred years, we’ve become an urban species. Today, more than half of humanity, 3.5 billion people, cluster in cities, and scientists predict that by 2050 our cities will enthrall 70 percent of the world’s citizens. The trend is undeniable as the moon, unstoppable as an avalanche.

Between 2005 and 2013, China’s urban population skyrocketed from 13 percent to 40 percent, with most people moving from very rural locales to huddled megacities whose streets jingle with chance and temptation. At that pace, by 2030, over half of China’s citizens will live in cities, and instead of farming food locally they’ll import much of it from other nations, paying with the fruits of industry, invention, and manufacturing. That’s already the case in the U.K., where by 1950 a checkerboard of cities embraced 79 percent of the population. By 2030, when the U.K.’s city-dwellers reach 92 percent, it will be a truly urban nation, joining a zodiac of others. Ninety percent of Argentinians already dwell in cities, 88 percent of Germans, 78 percent of the French, 80 percent of South Koreans. For a rural nation, one needs to journey to Bhutan, Uganda, or Papua New Guinea, where nearly everyone lives in the countryside, with a scant 10 percent committed to metropolitan life—so far.

Our city-chase has reached such a frenzy that the idea of migration doesn’t begin to capture its rush or rarity. This isn’t surprising in an economically lopsided world where, too often, newcomers end up in crowded shantytowns, favelas, and slums, because cities concentrate the very poverty from which they offer an escape. But that won’t slow the influx as long as hope wears Nikes and is steeped in fumes.

Oz-like cities shimmer as beacons of prosperity, with enhanced education, better medicine, more jobs for women, and wide streaks of upward mobility. Even environmentally, cities can eclipse sparsely settled country life. When roads, power lines, and sewers lie closer together, they require fewer resources. Apartments are insulated by the civil geometry of the buildings, making them easier to heat, cool, and light. Crowded neighbors can share public transportation, and most destinations tend to be close, within walking or biking distance; people rarely need cars. As a result, city-dwellers actually create a much smaller carbon footprint than rural-dwellers do. Cities like New York boast the lowest amount of energy use per household and per person, and so, paradoxically, although the city as a whole uses more energy, each person uses less. It seems counterintuitive, but city life can be a more eco-friendly way for humans to live. Cities in developing countries also use less energy—but that’s because the number of poor tends to be higher there and they consume less, including less food and fresh water.

Still, despite clustering services and leaving smaller individual footprints, the record number of people fleeing the countryside for city life is worrisome to climatologists, because cities are environmental game-changers. Big cities are hotspots, on average ten degrees warmer than their surroundings, and they emit most of the planet’s pollution, as cars prowl their streets and food caravans travel long distances to stock their groceries. On some summer days, the air hangs thickly visible, like the combined exhalations of millions of souls. Steam rising from vents underground makes you wonder if there isn’t one giant sweat gland lodged beneath the city.

One of the paradoxes of our age is that we’re urban primates who are still adapted to the wilderness, which we long for and need, at the same time that we’re destroying, building over, and farming all that’s wild. Since the crowd-rush to these asphalt jungles is accelerating, we need ingenious ways of harmonizing city life with human and planetary well-being. Our challenge will be finding a way to have both, while also preserving the planet.

Some of the best ideas I’ve encountered do just that, transforming our cities from grimy energy guzzlers into dynamic ecosystems.

City parks are essential, but in addition, picture shade-loving wildflowers in gated alleyways, fresh vegetables growing on roofs and piers, lushly planted walls, vertical farms in skyscrapers, rooftop beehives brewing honey, and nature trails threading through rusty old infrastructure. Greening a city with vegetation is a proven way to cool it down, filter the air, suck out carbon dioxide, ladle in more oxygen, and offer pockets of calm amid the bustle and din.

Hoping to achieve that intermingling, a new branch of environmentalism known as “Reconciliation Ecology” has emerged, which strives to preserve biodiversity on our doorstep in cities and other human-dominated habitats. The term “reconciliation ecology” was coined by Michael Rosenzweig in his book Win-Win Ecology, and it has a lovely ring to it. It suggests fence-mending and coexisting in harmony, not a wallop of blame. It’s based on figures showing that we haven’t enough unsettled land left on Earth to protect all of life’s biodiversity, but we can make room for plenty more in our cities and yards.

Along country roads near my house, where cornfields and houses predominate, you’ll see nest boxes for bluebirds, provided by thoughtful bird-lovers because natural tree cavities have grown scarce. When replacing wooden fence posts with steel ones led to the rapid disappearance of shrikes (medium-sized birds with hooked beaks like birds of prey), locals restored the wooden fence posts (on which shrikes like to perch), and the shrikes returned. These may be small acts of reconciliation, but if you create enough of them it can change the big picture. And not just in the countryside. Some of the most improbable-sounding efforts are blurring the line between civilized and wild. “Wastewater Treatment Plant” may not sound like a natural or particularly scenic destination. But some symbiotically minded towns have been designing a new breed of wildlife preserve, one that gives recycling a lively twist. Instead of dumping treated water, they return it to nature as the essence of an ecosystem that offers food and habitat to animals. As the water is further purified by vegetation, migrating and native birds find a home, entangled communities of plants and insects take up residence, and a hodgepodge of wild animals bustle in.

City-dwellers then needn’t travel far for an interlude to refresh their habit-dulled senses. Strolling, gawking, sitting, camera-clicking, humans become one more changing feature in the perpetual tableau, another flock of familiar creatures to whom the scores of nesting birds pay little mind.

A favorite such preserve of mine is the Wakodahatchee Wetlands in suburban Delray Beach, Florida. On a boardwalk raised ten feet above any hazard, one can watch an alligator gliding among the bulrushes, fish defending their mud nests from marauding turtles, dabbling ducks and teals, wading birds stalking their prey. The shallow water and raised trail make many dramas visible from above, including whiskered otters catching whiskered sail-finned catfish. Pig frogs grunt like their namesakes. If you’re lucky, you might see a patch of water fizzing like frying diamonds in the sun—where a male gator is bellowing in a bass too low for human ears. Or you might spot a giant prehistoric apparition standing like a sentinel in the water, as an endangered wood stork displays its distinctive gnarled-wood bald head and long curved beak.

The wooden walkway loops for nearly a mile through fifty acres of swamps, marshes, ponds, reeds, and bogs. Wherever water and land meet, life seems to thrive. Flapping around an archipelago of brushy and treed islands, ibis run a regular feeding patrol to nests full of squawking chicks.

Despite the usual urban hubbub, 140 species of birds broadcast on every channel at Wakodahatchee, from a pitying of collared doves to a pandemonium of monk parakeets. Red-nosed moorhens create a steady background score of trumpeting, clucking, and loud monkey-cackling. Courting roseate spoonbills play the castanets of their bills. Red-winged blackbirds spout the only buzzwords.

Though surrounded by restaurants, offices, condos, malls, and highways, Wakodahatchee’s wetlands attract a bounty of life, including wild plants one rarely sees in cities. What at first seems a flush of algae, or a pointillist canvas of sunstruck water, is brilliant chartreuse duckweed. This simple aquatic plant floats everywhere on the slower-moving waters of our planet, offering food to birds, shade to frogs and fish, and a warm blanket to alligators and small fry. One day it may also provide a cheap source of high protein for humans (it’s already eaten as a vegetable in some parts of Asia) or a cheap producer of biofuel that will power cars while filtering carbon dioxide from the air.

There’s no stigma attached to reconciliation projects being lucrative. Israel’s Red Sea Star Restaurant, for example, 230 feet off the shore of Eilat, is a combination bistro and observatory, seating people in its colorful, marine-inspired dining room sixteen feet down from the surface on the sandy sea floor. Plexiglas windows offer diners, sitting on squid-shaped chairs under dimmed, anemone-shaped lights, a view of a wealth of sea creatures in the coral gardens by day or night. Equally curious fish also get to ogle the diners. It happens to be an architectural showpiece, but it’s also an ecological triumph that has restored a coral reef that was lost through human pollution and overuse. Architects began by choosing a barren stretch of sea floor, laying down an iron meshwork, and transplanting coral colonies onto the trellis, where they cling like slow-motion trapeze artists and continue to attract marine life.

In an acrylic tube submerged in the Indian Ocean, at Hilton Hotels’ Ithaa Restaurant, in the Maldives, diners are also surrounded by fish and coral as they eat. Although the Maldives, a nation of islands only five feet above sea level, emits but a tiny fraction of the world’s pollution, its president, Mohamed Nasheed, has set the most ambitious climate goals of any country on Earth, promising to go carbon neutral within ten years, while building sustainable hotels and restaurants and even a floating golf course. “Our oil-fired power stations will be replaced with solar, wind, and biomass plants,” Nasheed explains. “Our waste will be turned into clean electricity through pyrolysis technology, and a new generation of boats will slash marine transport pollution. By 2020, the use of fossil fuels will be virtually eliminated in the Maldivian archipelago.” Greening the economy is good for the Maldives, which has begun attracting a flock of eco-tourists and investors, and it’s also a model for changes radical enough to help fix the climate.

In some cities, coexisting with nature means salvaging rusty old infrastructure, reclaiming abandoned blocks and trashyards, and forging junked metal into inviting habitats for plants, animals, and humans. In every U.S. state, and many other countries from Iceland to Estonia, Australia, and Peru, out-of-work railroad tracks have morphed into peaceful “rail trails” ideal for biking, hiking, and cross-country skiing. Most often they slip through towns or skirt farmlands, drawing both humans and wildlife to leafy byways. I’ve biked or cross-country skied on some beauties in Ohio, California, Arizona, and New York. Memorably, biking on a rail trail outside Gambier, Ohio, at dawn, I was chased by a flock of farm geese. I knew their charge was merely bravado, so I pedaled slowly and let them nip at my pant legs, which seemed to give them a sense of territorial satisfaction, and they soon returned to the barnyard. I enjoyed their brief honking companionship, and learned something about geese I didn’t know: what clamorous watchdogs they make.

A different stripe of oasis growing in popularity is the High Line on Manhattan’s West Side, a surprising sprawl of undulating benches, nests, perches, and lookouts, giving New York City yet another bridge—this one between the urban and the rural. An old elevated freight spur, little more than a rusty eyesore on the Hudson, it’s metamorphosed into a tapestry of self-seeding wildflowers and domestic blooms. It isn’t the first raised park (there’s the Promenade Plantée in Paris, and remember the Hanging Gardens of Babylon?), but the High Line is the loveliest city rail trail I know.

Picturesque, with many scenic views, it’s also richly detailed and alive, allowing you to feel elevated in spirit, floating in a garden in space where butterflies, birds, humans, and other organisms mingle. In a practical sense, it’s a lofty shortcut, a sky alley that avoids all the intersections. A million people have already strolled its landscaped corridors, and it’s inspired other cities hoping for similar sky parks. Chicago, Mexico City, Rotterdam, Santiago, and Jerusalem are among those following suit with their derelict trestles, each an urban renewal project featuring regional plants and its own special character or sense of humor. In Wuppertal, Germany, the rails-to-trails corridor includes a brightly colored LEGO-style bridge. Like the wastewater wetlands, such projects are widening our notion of recycling and yielding an urban lifestyle that’s interwoven with nature.

As one salve in our medicine cabinet of good ideas, these vest-pocket urban parks and wildlife corridors have deep roots around the world, from nest boxes for storks in Romania, Switzerland, Poland, Germany, Spain, and other havens along their well-flapped migration routes to species-rich Central Park in the heart of New York City, London’s eight city parks (in several of which deer roam), the temperate rainforest of Vancouver’s Stanley Park, Moscow’s Losiny Ostrov (“Moose Island”) National Park, Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai, sod roofs and greenways from Germany to the Faroe Islands, St. Luke’s Hospital rooftop garden in Tokyo, mandatory rooftop gardens in Copenhagen (and proposed in Toronto). A surprising jumble of native species thrives in and around heavily planted Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Cape Town, Stockholm, and Chicago, which have become biodiversity hotspots. Then there’s Singapore’s big, blooming, downtown Gardens by the Bay, enriching city life with more than 240,000 rare plants, flowers, and trees in domes that rise sixteen stories over the city. Including a cloud forest and aerial walkways, the gardens collect rainwater, generate solar electricity, and bathe the air. Opening on June 29, 2012, they drew 70,000 nature-hungry visitors during the first two days.

Although these new city oases won’t work for all species, or for all communities, the trend for rewilding our cities is growing. It’s positive, it enlightens, it’s widespread, and it helps. We need to retrofit and reimagine cities as planet-friendly citadels. They’re our hives and reefs. Sea mussels aren’t the only animals living in individual shells that are glued together.

A Green Man in a Green Shade

As a child, Patrick Blanc loved going to the doctor’s office. A six-foot-long aquarium in the waiting room tickled his eyes with colorful tropical fish and plush green plants that swayed in the current and beckoned like hands. To an urban boy growing up in the Parisian suburbs, it offered a glimpse of paradise. When he put his ear to the small box attached to the aquarium, he heard the bubbling of water through tubes and the filter’s hum. The hydraulics and engineering intrigued him as much as the fish, and before long he designed his own small aquarium at home. For a spell, he also adopted coral-beaked waxbills, setting them free on Thursday and Sunday mornings to fly around the apartment.

As he entered adolescence, his nomadic curiosity drifted from aquariums and birds to aquatic plants, and then, at fifteen, he leapt above the waves to the world’s moist shaded zones, the mysterious understory of tropical forests. A college trip to the rainforests of Thailand and Malaysia brought the revelation that “plants could sprout at any height, not merely from the ground.”

Now a bounty of planted walls refreshing cities around the world owe their design or inspiration to Blanc’s eco-pageants, and lure birds, butterflies, and hummingbirds while they mutate with the seasons.

One of Blanc’s personal favorites, a green city icon, is the magnificent Quai Branly Museum in Paris, which opened in 2006 and was greeted by many as a botanical epiphany. Multitextured meadows climb the thirteen-thousand-square-foot facade of the building, more than half of which is alive. The rest is windows, creating a giant plaid of thick-leafed, mossy, breathing wall, touchably soft, rich with scent, atwitch with birds.

Cloaking the facade in great variety to reflect the cultural diversity of the world’s artists, Blanc chose a pastiche of species from temperate zones in North America, Europe, South America, Asia, and Africa. He would have included Oceania, but tropical plants can’t survive the Paris winters, and the facade—which is part botanical tapestry, part hidden lagoon, and entirely soil-free—is intended to endure for many years, filling the senses of Parisians, and building a 40-foot-tall, 650-foot-wide ecosystem amid the hard premises of city life, while also helping to purify the air and eliminate carbon dioxide. In warm weather, flowers bloom, butterflies nectar, and birds perch and nest in the dense thickets. One half-expects to find miniature deer browsing on its mossy hillocks. The museum director plans on adding frogs and tree lizards. Because our horizontal indoor life can flatten the mind, some of the administrative offices also have smaller vertical gardens, which are visible through the windows, blurring the line between outside and inside even more.

How can a towering garden with a northern exposure survive the icy winds sweeping across the Seine? That’s where Blanc’s education and research as a botanist come in. The living wall is hardy because he’s chosen hundreds of understory species that he’s discovered can nonetheless tolerate slathers of direct light and wind.

“When I think of Heuchera,” he says, referring to a family of plants that includes coral bells and alumroot, which produce small delicate flowers, and whose leaves are like hands with the fingers extended, “I always think of their leaves emerging intact from the melting snow in April, along the steep slopes in the shade of giant sequoias in California.”

Blanc works with a palette of deep rich greens in dozens of subtle shades and intensities, from asparagus and fern green to forest or praying mantis green, and textures that run the gamut from matte to hairy, spongy to sheen. All vary with time of day, age, season, clouds eclipsing the sun, fog rolling off the river, rush-hour traffic, aberrations of twilight. Seen through our rods and cones, the colors remix and evolve perpetually as they would if we encountered them in a forest. He prefers leaves to flowers, doesn’t care for trailing vines, and is sensitive to the architecture of leaves. The thousands of individual plants he quilts together grow leaves that are bristled, pointed, star-shaped, notched, oval, sickle-shaped, circular, teardrop, blunt, heart-shaped, arrow-headed, and more. Some climb while others descend, some mound or bloom daintily, others sprout or cantilever. Knowing the habit of each, he draws a multicelled planting map that looks like swirling fingerprints or a paint-by-number guide, with each segment a plant species referred to by Latin name.[8]

“They begin like paintings,” he explains. “Then they develop texture and depth.”

As a science-based art form, it’s a fusion inspired by many muses. The plants are drawn on flat paper, so each design does indeed begin like a painting. Then the artwork morphs into a sensuous sculpture of touchable, biological, prunable shapes and colors. Leaves, flowers, stems dance in the air, a slow-motion ballet. He may try to choreograph them to some degree, but the ensemble will succumb to wild swings of improvisation, depending on the weather. As frogs, birds, and insects take up residence, they’ll add a croaking-chirping-buzzing chorale, with some notes foreseeable and the rest jazz variations.

Although the plants naturally curve, clear lines and clean edges give the finished work a tone of sensuous elegance, not disarray. It’s lofty and complex, not cluttered. The plants aren’t exactly wild, but they can flourish in unique ways. In that sense, it’s more like chaos aligned—a deliberate, contained, carefully measured, masterfully executed free-for-all.

Practical botany, hydraulics, physics, and materials science are essential scaffolding for the artistry. Thousands of individual plants are inserted by hand into pockets on a flat felt sheet that’s rigidly framed and will be watered and fed, rain-style, by intermittent showers from a hidden pipe running across the top. Despite the lack of soil, the plants quickly flourish, covering the felt and pipe. The overall effect is a gulp of wild nature that hits you in the solar plexus. This is a garden you stand up and greet at eye level, as you would a person. It invites you to touch and smell it. Look up, and it looms four stories above you like an expansive forest understory, not a fairy-tale giant. Close in, it creates its own weather bubble and is quite shady and moist if you stand beside it and tilt up your chin at the dizzying vegetation. Balancing on a very thin wire between tame and free-willed, it seems both intimate and indomitable.

VERTICAL GARDENS, LIVING roofs, and urban farms are going mainstream everywhere. A few of my favorites: Mexico City’s towering arches carpeted in fifty thousand plants astride car-clogged avenues; the blooming brocade of native plants adorning the inner walls of the Dolce Vita shopping center in Lisbon; the glassed-in courtyard of Milan’s Café Trussardi, where a canopy of frizzy greens and purples floats above diners and cocktail-sipping flaneurs, trailing vines and flowers like a hint of heaven; the golden wheatfield atop the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa; nine sinuous houses buried under earth and grass in Dietikon, Switzerland; the Grange, atop two buildings in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where you’re surrounded by organic vegetables and views of the Hudson. The roof of the Chicago Botanic Gardens’ Rice Plant Conservation Science Center doubles as a garden visited by millions of people and a botanical laboratory, and the roof of Chicago’s City Hall also serves as a study site, with the usual black tar on one side and a wildflower garden on the other. (On summer days, the ambient air above the planted side measures as much as 78°F cooler than the air over the old blacktop.) And living rooftops are becoming hot property. One U.S. company has already sold 1.2 million square feet of sprouting, blooming, bird-, bee-, and butterfly-enticing roofs, mainly to private residences.

Other living roofs and vertical garden companies have sprung up and begun greening all sorts of buildings, from hospitals, homes, and police stations to banks and offices. Some use hydroponic methods; others plant in turf on the roof à la the European tradition. A former Renault factory in Boulogne, France, has been reborn as a school with an undulating green-roof that reduces heating and cooling costs. The design firm Green over Grey, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, has created some spectacular living walls for sites in Canada, including the international building at Edmonton Airport, where arriving visitors inhale a shot of oxygen and plant-scrubbed fresh air from a gigantic living wall whose design swirls were inspired by high-altitude cloud formations. “Jungle Waterfall,” their dramatic, multistory cascade in an office building in Vancouver, includes tropical trees, and a maintenance crew occasionally has to harvest the pineapples lest they fall and hit passersby.

Planted walls and roofs and sustainably designed buildings, along with wildlife corridors, city parks, solar and wind power, and trees aglow with bioluminescent foliage (to replace streetlamps), are but a few of the initiatives gaining popularity in the U.K., Germany, Taiwan, the United States, and many other places worldwide. Roofs planted with sedums and succulents blossom, changing color with the seasons, while being low-maintenance, reflecting heat, and providing a habitat for birds. The goal is homes and public spaces that are living organisms that will scrub the air of pollutants, increase oxygen, reduce noise, save energy, refresh the spirit, and sink our roots deeper into the natural world.

IN CONTRAST TO Blanc’s elegantly formal walls for the Quai Branly and a similar project at the Athenaeum Hotel in London, his own house on the outskirts of Paris is a throbbing green Mardi Gras of microhabitats, with knolls of lance-shaped leaves, jutting rocks, prongs of tiny flowers, thick heart-shaped leaves, arrow-leafed philodendrons with roots adrift in a flowing stream. You don’t so much enter the abode he shares with his longtime partner, the actor Pascal Henri (a.k.a. “Pascal of Bollywood”), as join a green rhapsody, or possibly a green bedlam, and become part of the cascading carnival of fronds, mounds of moss, umbrellaing ferns, twig elbows, searching roots, and leafy limbs probing at everything, including you. The superabundance of leaves caresses you lightly with barely discernible veined fingers as you pass. Beaded curtains serve as doors, and free-flying coral-beaked waxbills wing from room to room. Bouncing frogs and slithering lizards roam the house at ease, eyes rotating, tongues occasionally unfurling like party favors. At a Magritte-like Surrealist window, a bushy shrub on the inside echoes its twin on the outside. Your eye shimmies. Inside, outside—who can say where they begin or end? Glass is only liquid sand, after all, and only ever in motion, hourglasslike, pouring so slowly that our eyes read it as solid.

Blanc’s study is a green thought in a green shade where he’s walking on water. Literally. The floor is a sheet of plate glass atop a 20′ x 23′ aquarium, home to a lush expanse of vegetation and over a thousand tropical fish. Holding 5,283 gallons of water, it’s loaded with plants whose long white roots ripple like medusas, as they naturally purify the water and also provide grottos for the fish.

The large wall behind his glasswork table is a weave of plants with plush textures, mossy tussocks, cascading fronds, and a kaleidoscope of greens. At the base of the living walls, a narrow stream flows, providing nourishment for roots and refreshment and nesting sites for the birds. He dips a hand in as a bird glides overhead to perch in the rhododendrons. Here and there, algae, moss, and liverworts have sprung up on their own. In a large bookcase, nearly all the books have green jackets. Only little brown bats and bombardier beetles are missing.

“I take my shower outside every day, even if it’s snowing,” he confesses. “I refuse to heed the limits between inside and outside imposed on a human lifestyle that migrated from tropical origins to colder, even glacial climates. To heighten the absurdity, life in tropical cities requires air-conditioning to cool the indoor atmosphere. Wherever one goes in the world, regardless of the season, it is necessary to either heat or cool dwellings.” This merits a hand lifted to the absurdity. “We need buildings with a better thermal balance.”

Despite his serious purpose, a spell of playfulness pervades his preferred habitat, as it does his person. His shirts all seem to be patterned in leaf designs; he wears green shoes, has a two-inch-long thumbnail painted forest green, and wears a streak of bright green in his hair. For a moment I think he might have a single leaf of Iris japonica growing from his skull—his green forelock is shaped like one of its long, tapering leaves. It is his signature plant: one often sees Iris japonica dangling down forest edges in the wild. Blanc uses it in most of his installations as an echo of gently cascading water.

“We live in an era where human activity is overwhelming,” he continues. His chilled white wine, Vogue menthol cigarette, computer, and electric lights make it clear that he does appreciate cosmopolitan life. In fact, he’s spent all of his life living in cities—while making forays to some of the wildest places on Earth.

“I think we can reconcile nature and man to a much greater degree.”

He’s not alone in that conviction. A good start may be rethinking our houses, because at the racing heart of every city is still the ancient, unalienable idea of home.

House Plants? How Passé

Home, for the Inuit, had an elemental simplicity. They used bone knives to carve bricks from quarries of hardened snow. A short, low tunnel led to the front door, trapping heat in and fierce cold and critters out. Mortar wasn’t needed, because the snow bricks were shaved to fit, and at night the dome ossified into a glistening ice fort, with the human warmth inside melting the ice just enough to seal the seams. The idea behind such homes was refuge from elements and predators, based on a watchful understanding of both. The igloo was really an extension of the self—shoulder blades of snow and backbone of ice, beneath which a family slept, swathed in thick animal fur, beside one or two small blubber lamps. All the building materials lay at hand, perpetually recycled, costing nothing but effort.

Picture most of our houses and apartment buildings today—full of sharp angles, lit by bulbs and colors one doesn’t find in nature, built from plywood, linoleum, iron, cement, and glass. Despite their style, efficiency, and maybe good location, they don’t always offer us a sense of sanctuary, rest, or well-being. And they’re not particularly healthy. A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study found levels of twelve volatile compounds two to five times higher indoors—no matter if the home was rural or urban—due to the products we use and poor ventilation. Because we can’t escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we instinctively encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives.

No wonder there’s an impassioned push worldwide to build green homes with verdant walls and roofs, inspired by Patrick Blanc, equally green workplaces that breathe and clean themselves like street cats, and well-tilled farms on rooftops and in ziggurats. It doesn’t make sense to shut out nature in the old way. Our fundamental archetype of a foursquare, armorlike building perched on a scrap of earth is evolving from a static and ultimately disposable dwelling into one that, like a tree, mingles holistically with the world around it, not just absorbing a staggering amount of nutrients but producing even more than it consumes.

An alternative is the culture of sustainability and “cradle to cradle” design redefining the world of goods and architecture and city planning. According to the principle of “cradle to cradle” (a term coined by the Swiss architect Walter R. Stahel in the 1970s), everything we make—apartment buildings, bridges, toys, clothes—should be designed with reclamation and rebirth in mind. Instead of tossing the outmoded ephemera of civilization onto rubbish heaps, and then extracting and grinding down more resources to replace them, why not fabricate objects that will naturally biodegrade or can be recycled by industry as “technical nutrients”? Durables such as televisions, cars, computers, refrigerators, heaters, and carpets could be leased and traded in when worn out or untrendy, allowing manufacturers to recycle them and harvest the raw materials.

In 1999 the architect William McDonough accepted the challenge of redesigning Ford Motor Company’s eighty-five-year-old River Rouge factory, a project that required redesigning the ten-acre roof of its 1.1-million-square-foot truck assembly plant. He began by endowing the roof with its own weather system—acres of sedum, a low-growing succulent that blooms dusty-pink or linen-white in the fall and the rest of the year displays large rain-swollen leaves. Then he knitted the factory and plants into the landscape with “a system of wet meadow gardens, porous paving, hedgerows and bio-swales that attenuates, cleanses, and conveys storm water across the site.”

Inspired by such models, and hoping to rank high on the prestigious LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating system, architects are vying to create equally well-behaved buildings that “are environmentally responsible, profitable and healthy places to live and work.” They’re striving for regenerative buildings that purify their wastewater, create more energy than they use, and compost and recycle to such an extent that industry blends seamlessly with nature. “In essence,” Andres Edwards writes in The Sustainability Revolution, “a world of abundance, rather than limits, pollution, and waste.” This revolution stems from an ethos that’s reverberating around the world in developed and developing countries alike; as Edwards reminds us, “Brazil, Canada, China, Guatemala, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Netherlands Antilles have LEED-registered projects, demonstrating that the standard can adapt to different cultures and bioregions.”

We aren’t adhering any longer to the myth that food must be grown far away and transported on trucks. We can easily envisage restaurant rooftop farms, urban beekeeping and midtown chicken coops. We can’t grow everything around the corner—not grains, or soy, or corn, to be sure—but we can grow most of our vegetables and fruits. Local farms feed the food chain, save fuel, and guarantee a fresher and more nutritious diet. And they’re cropping up on every continent, including the last place one might guess.

In Antarctica, where the average coastal temperature is -70°F with inland dips to -180°F, the American research base, McMurdo Station, is a town of naked machines and heavily insulated people. There darkness saturates winter, inking out the sky for six months, during which occasional green auroras shoot up like magnetic demons’ tails, and indoors the auroras are falling white showers of man-made fluorescence. There are two primary smells (sweat and diesel fuel) and two primary colors (black and white). Fresh produce arrives by air from Los Angeles and costs $80,000 to $100,000 per week in the summer. During the winter, deliveries may be months apart.

“Clearly, this is no banana belt,” says Robert Taylor, the good-humored technician who, along with many volunteers, has overseen McMurdo’s 649-square-foot greenhouse. “And there is no history of oxen tied to wooden plows turning over rich black soil. Actually, on this side of the continent, there is no soil at all, only weathered volcanic rock and, of course, ice. There is nothing in the way of organic matter to speak of, and no recognizable terrestrial plants. And yet, life blooms… under thousands of watts of artificial light.”

It’s hardly roomy, especially compared to gardens in his hometown of Missoula, Montana. But by using hydroponic techniques he’s been able to harvest about 3,600 pounds of spinach, Swiss chard, cucumbers, herbs, tomatoes, peppers, and other vegetables each year—pure manna to the green-starved residents.

“Not enough to register on the world’s export market, but nothing to sneer at if you are one of the approximately 200 people who choose to winter here,” Taylor says via e-mail.

“Lettuces grow like champs,” he notes. “There are nearly 900 lettuce heads growing at any time on tiered growing systems. Likewise, basil and parsley are herbs that need very little in the way of input.” That’s just as well, because he has to pollinate them all by hand, since insects, the natural pollinators, are forbidden, lest they devastate the small greenhouse Eden.

“It’s strange that a horticulturist would come all the way to Antarctica to grow vegetables, but as far as challenges and thrills, what better place to confront the beauty of plants than in an environment so devoid of them?… Each tomato, each cucumber becomes a jewel, precious.”

As if it were a laid-back bar in Key West, two hammocks and a cozy old armchair float in a humid corner, “for those who wish to commune with arugula.” Many do. At McMurdo, not only vegetation but humidity, scent, and natural colors are rare. On the other hand, howling isolation and intense relationships are the norm. Many people thrive on the parabolic sunlight and unusually intimate community. But those beset by “polar T3,” overwintering syndrome, can find their thyroid levels askew and metabolism rocky, with sleeplessness, irritation, and depression constant bedfellows. In an all-white kingdom of ice and snow, where the only low-hanging fruit are the stars, one’s sanity can tremble on a stem slender as a marigold’s.

Fortunately, purple-and-yellow pansies and orange marigolds (both edible) grow in the greenhouse, where the rainbow stalks of Swiss chard create a small psychedelic forest, and scarlet cherry tomatoes dangle from string supports like floppy marionettes. Cilantro, basil, chives, rosemary, and thyme scent the air. The sensory repast as well as the food nourishes greenhouse visitors, and the plants lap up the CO₂ exhaled by the humans. Unlike typical greenhouses in winter, this one has no sunlight streaming through cathedral-like walls of glass. McMurdo’s urban farm at the bottom of the world is completely sealed and insulated, and, in a stark village where windows are precious, I’m told it also offers a leafy idyll for a dinner date. Even in this extreme outpost of a city, the benefits of greening ease the way.

There will soon come a time when farming needn’t have a country flavor, and referring to “the north forty” means crops forty floors up. PlantLab in the Netherlands grows forty different crops indoors, using hydroponics and high-tech sensors, without pesticides, and even without windows. Plants don’t need the whole spectrum of light; instead each crop is raised with the precise amount of blue or red light it craves. As the water evaporates, it’s recycled, so only a pittance extra is needed. In these specially controlled environments, the crop yield is three times higher than outdoors, and the process would do equally well in the Sahara or Siberia once LED lights become a bit cheaper.

All of our buildings need to earn their keep. We’re probably in the last era of deadbeat buildings. In the United States alone, buildings use 40 percent of the country’s raw materials, burn 65 percent of the total electricity, and drain 12 percent of drinkable water, while piling up 136 million tons a year of demolition and construction wastes.

SUPPOSE THE GOAL is buildings that are inherently living organisms. Just how alive could a home or office become? In addition to living walls and planted roofs, its skin could mimic plant metabolism and animal musculature. “Biomimicry” is an old idea but a dynamic and lucrative new direction in architecture and engineering that mines the genius of nature to find sustainable solutions to knotty human problems.

Picture: Houses painted with lotusin, a self-cleaning paint inspired by the water-shedding veneer of leaves. Products colored without pigments, echoing the way light dances across peacock and blue-jay feathers. New lenses and fiber optics that mimic the almost distortion-free lenses coating the body of a brittle sea star, or the flexible optics atop a sea sponge’s tentacles. Electronic devices inspired by mussel tissue, which automatically dissolve when you discard them. A building whose outer skin resembles the porelike stomata of leaves and provides all the energy it needs. Ships’ hulls engineered like whale skin to glide through the water while burning less fuel, and airplane wings that save fuel by mimicking ripple-edged whale fins.

The result is organic, self-assembling, nonpolluting solutions that nature has already mastered and we can copy. This frame of mind requires a major flip in our way of thinking and our sense of how we exist in nature. For the longest time, “heat, beat, and treat” was the industrial motto. We’ve built cities and fueled empires by raiding the Earth’s resources, chopping them up, heating them, breaking them down with toxic chemicals, and fastening them together. Biomimicry asks: “Okay, that’s how humans make things—and it doesn’t work. How does life make things?”

“Organisms have figured out ways to do the miraculous things they do,” the biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus says, “without jeopardizing the future of their resources and offspring.”

Inspired by Benyus and others, cities are blooming with architecture that functions like (and sometimes resembles) growing organisms. Imagine transparent skyscrapers that save energy as their facades expand and contract like an elaborate array of muscles. In a working prototype designed by the New York firm Decker Yeadon, swirling silver ribbons in the glass facade are really a three-layered muscle: a rubbery polymer sheathing a flexible polymer core, with a silver coating that skittles an electrical charge across the surface. If it’s too cold, the ribbon-muscles “fire” and contract to slender squiggles, exposing lots of window to the sun. In hot weather, the ribbons expand like a patchwork of shot silk to create a flat parasol of shade. Many small segments self-regulate in this way, fiddling with their own thermostat to stay in homeostasis. Much as we do. Too warm? Shed the sweater and move out of the direct sun. As a design, muscular walls are more flexible and stronger than solar panels.

Or picture the high-rise office and shopping complex Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, which was inspired by a throng of gigantic termite towers. Topped by turrets and pinnacles, a city of vaulted termite mounds can rise thirty feet from the parched earth like otherworldly castles, while millions of laborers and soldiers toil inside, presided over by king and queen, with offspring raised communally. It’s an agricultural society, whose favorite crop is a fungus that will only grow at 87°F. Yet outside the thick mud walls, temperatures can plunge to near freezing at night and soar to broiling by day. Winds snort and snap one moment and tap like weary ghosts the next. Our windmills and wind turbines require a steady flow of wind, and they’re stymied by turbulence. Termite engineers harness chaotic winds far more skillfully by using their mounds as inside-out lungs.

Deep inside each mountainous city, termites capture and trim even the most sputtering, heat-whipped, muddled winds to the precise vibration needed to ventilate the colony and keep their crops flourishing. As they open and close a filigree of low doors, the mound inhales a rush of air into a maze of chambers and passageways, and shoots it up to the buttresses and tiptop chimneys. They keep tweaking their design by opening and closing doors, digging new doors, sealing old ones, adding wet mud in spots for quicker cooling. Each termite is like one neuron in a collective brain. It doesn’t need to be smart, and none can see the whole picture, but together they create coherent action and a kind of intelligence. Constant gardeners, they fine-tune the breeze and provide a steady temperature, which keeps the tiny, blind population cozy.

We have this in common: they are great openers of doors, as we are, though their doors are physical and many of ours are symbolic. Some of their blade-shaped “compass” mounds are oriented toward the sun at a time-tested angle to avoid the roasting noonday sun, yet usher in evening’s faint rays. My house was designed on the same principle by its first owner—vaulted south-facing windows in the living room let in more winter sun and provide summer shade.

Singing can draw oxygen through even injured lungs, and the mud colony fills with a vibrato, reassuring its lodgers that all is well. On some level unknown to us, an out-of-tune mound must not sound right to the termites, who are driven to build the most exquisite lungs possible because their lives depend on it. Does this mean they have an aesthetics that’s shared by the whole colony? Who’s to say. It could be that, to them, out-of-tune air stings like a million arrows.

Inspired by mud casts of the mound’s baroque nooks and crannies, the African architect Mick Pearce designed the Eastgate Centre. Fans on the first floor spirit air through ducts into the central spine of the building, and stale air seeps through exhaust vents on each floor, exiting at last from high chimneys. A river of fresh air automatically replaces it. Using only 10 percent as much energy as nearby buildings, the eco-friendly Centre has saved the owners $3.5 million in climate control, which they’ve passed on to their tenants by lowering the rent. Ten years later, Pearce built the even more efficient ten-story Council House 2 building in Melbourne, Australia. This time, recycled wooden shutters, covering one whole side of the building, open like petals at night to expel the warm air from offices and shops. This works well in Africa, but in colder climes excess warmth can’t be wasted. And so, in some countries, furnaces now have two legs.

Opportunity Warms

How intimate, how romantic, how sustainable of the French. As I waited with a throng of Parisians in Paris’s Rambuteau subway station on a blustery November day, my frozen toes finally began to thaw. Alone we may have shivered, but together we brewed so much body heat that people began unbuttoning their dark coats. We might have been emperor penguins crowding for warmth in Antarctica’s icy torment of winds.

Idly mingling, a human body radiates about 100 watts of excess heat, which can add up fast in confined spaces. Rushing commuters contribute even more, and heat also looms from the friction of trains on the tracks and seeps from the deep maze of tunnels, raising the platform temperature to around 70°F, almost a geothermal spa. As new people clambered on and off trains, and trickled up and down the staircases to Rue Beaubourg, their haste kept the communal den toasty.

Geothermal warmth may abound in volcanic Iceland, but it’s not easy to come by in downtown Paris. So why waste it? Instead mine people as a renewable green energy source. Tap even a fraction of the population, say, the heat cloud of subway commuters, and it’s a deep pocketful of free energy. In that spirit, savvy architects from Paris Habitat decided to borrow the surplus energy from all the hurrying bodies in the metro station and convert it into radiant underfloor heating for apartments in a nearby social housing project, which happens to share an unused stairwell with the station. Otherwise the heat borne through countless rushed breakfasts of croissant and café au lait, mind-theaters, idle reveries, and flights of boredom would be lost by the end of the morning rush hour. Opportunity warms.

Appealing as the design may be, it isn’t feasible throughout Paris without a pricey retrofit of buildings and metro stops. But it’s proving successful elsewhere. In America, there’s Minnesota’s prairielike monument to capitalism, the four-million-square-foot Mall of America. Even on subzero winter days the indoor temperature skirts 70°F from combined body heat, light fixtures, and sunlight cascading in through 1.2 miles of skylights. That’s just as well, since people can get married in the mall’s Chapel of Love on the third floor, next to Bloomingdale’s, and taffeta and chiffon aren’t the best insulators.

Or consider Scandinavia’s busiest travel hub, Stockholm’s Central Station, during morning rush hour on a blustery day in January. Outside, it’s -7°F, the streets are icy as a toboggan run, cold squirrels around your face, the air feels scratchy, and even in wool mittens your hands are tusks of ice. But indoors is another country, a temperate one filled with a living mass of humans heading in all directions. Pocketing the windfall, engineers are harnessing the body heat issuing from 250,000 railway travelers to help warm the thirteen-story Kungsbrohuset office building about a hundred yards away. Under the voluminous roof of the station, travelers donate their 100 watts of surplus natural heat, while visitors bustle around the dozens of shops, buying meals, drinks, books, flowers, cosmetics, and such, bestowing even more energy.

You can almost feel a gentle tugging at your skin. There’s a warm draft.

“Why shouldn’t we use it?” asks Klas Johansson, who works for Jernhusen, the state-owned developer of the project. “If we don’t use it it’s just going to be ventilated away.”

Citizen lamplighters, citizen furnace-stokers—antique corps of volunteers fill my imagination. All cheap and renewable. This ultragreen design works dramatically well in Sweden, a land of soaring fuel costs, ecologically minded citizens, and a legendary arctic winter becalmed by few hours of daylight and a horizon-hugging sun. Night blankets the city in stellar darkness by midafternoon. Offset as the night may be with cozy lantern-lit streets, candle-lit windows, and the luminous green ribbons and dancing halos of the northern lights, when cold clambers up the bones, more heat is the sole comfort. But fuel can take many forms, from fossil to solar energy, oil and gas to the residue left in paper mills, or Central Station’s… well, what shall we call it? As a technology it needs a catchy name, something sociable. Maybe “Auraglow,” “Beradiant,” “EnsnAired,” or “FriendEnergy”?

The design of heat recycling works like this: first the station’s ventilation system captures the commuters’ body heat, which it uses to warm water in underground tanks. From there, the hot water is pumped to Kungsbrohuset’s pipes, covering a third of its fuel needs per year. Kungsbrohuset’s design has other sustainable elements as well. The windows, angled to allow in maximum sunlight during the winter, also block the fiercest rays in summer. Fiber optics whisper daylight from the roof into dark stairwells and other nonwindowed spaces, where lazy buildings would need to pay for electricity. In summer, bone-chilling lake water flows through the veins of the building. If you can’t cool off regularly by dunking in the lake, at least you can enjoy a sort of dry plunge.

Part of the appeal of heating buildings with body heat is the delicious simplicity of finding a new way to use old technology (just people, pipes, pumps, and water). It’s worth noting that the buildings can’t be more than two hundred feet apart, or too much heat would be lost in transit. The essential ingredient is a reliable flux of people scuttling to and fro each day to tender the heat, so the design only works in high-traffic areas. Perhaps, on low-volume days, children might be invited to use the space as a gym for high-energy sports.

“Be a joule,” the Public Service billboards for EnsnAired heating might urge, noting in fine print: “A person radiates about 350,000 joules of energy per hour, and since 1 watt equals 1 joule per second, one person can effortlessly illumine the darkening world with the energy of a 100-watt lightbulb. A city of 2.25 million people can light 22,500 lamps.” Linger with that image for a moment—a multitude of lamps, each one sparkling, but together providing a great cloak of light. Paraphrasing a proverb attributed to Peter Benenson, founder of Amnesty International, it might say: “It’s better to become one lightbulb than to curse the darkness.”

Widening their vision to embrace neighborhoods, Jernhusen engineers talk of finding a way to capture excess body heat on a scale large enough to warm homes and office buildings in a perpetual cycle of mutual generosity. Heat generated by people at home at night would be piped to office buildings first thing in the morning, and then heat shed in the offices during the day would flow to the residences in the late afternoon. Nature is full of life-giving cycles; why not add this renewable human one?

In this Golden Rule technology of neighbor helping neighbor, we would all share heat from the tiny campfires in our cells—what could be more selfless? Just by walking briskly, or mousing around the shops, you can stoke the heat in someone’s chilly kitchen. Possibly a friend’s, but not necessarily. I’ll warm your apartment today, you’ll warm my schoolroom tomorrow. It’s effective and homely as gathering together in a cave. Sometimes there’s nothing like an old idea revamped.

It’s hard not to admire the Swedes’ resolve, but it wasn’t always this way. During the 1970s Sweden suffered from pollution, dying forests, lack of clean water, and an oil habit exceeding any other in the industrialized world. In the past decade, through the use of wind and solar power, recycling of wastewater throughout eco-suburbs, linking up urban infrastructure in synergistic ways, and imposing stringent building codes, Swedes have axed their oil dependency by a staggering 90 percent, trimmed CO₂ by 9 percent, and reduced sulfur pollution to pre–World War I levels. It was Sweden that in 1968 proposed a U.N. conference to focus on how we’re using and depleting the environment, and when it came about, in 1972, Stockholm hosted it. Billed as the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, it stressed that human and environment are no longer separate entities, because we’ve reached the stage where “man is both creature and moulder of his environment.”

In addition to harvesting human warmth with élan, the Swedes excel at coaxing energy for their cities from other renewable sources. Greeting visitors, the world’s largest energy storage unit lies beneath Arlanda, Stockholm’s airport, where an underground reservoir over a mile long heats and cools the five million square feet of terminals.

On the windswept coast of Sweden, Joakim Byström’s company, Absolicon, has developed the world’s first solar concentrator that produces electricity and heat at the same time. Made of iron and glass, its shiny tents track the sun like parallel rows of flowers atop Absolicon’s roof, fueling its factory. A world away, in a remote region of Chile’s Patagonia National Park, twenty of Absolicon’s solar collectors fuel the hotels where hikers can overnight in comfort. Lodged atop a hospital in Mohali, India, the company’s panels produce heat, electricity, and steam.

In their own sociable way, the small Swedish eco-city of Kalmar and its neighbor towns (a population of nearly a quarter of a million) are making a dramatic change—switching from oil, gas, and electric furnaces to recycled fuel. Heavily forested, the historic port city nestles partly on the Swedish mainland, edging the Baltic Sea, and partly on islands connected by weblike bridges. An important trading city since the eighth century, it combines cobblestone streets with state-of-the-art chic offices and museums. In winter it’s hard to tell the shards of ice floating on the sound from the jagged spires of Kalmar Castle, whose reflection mingles with them in the water. With the plentiful forests comes timber, and from it, sawdust and other wood waste, which can be used to create shared district heat, in which superheated water is piped through an underground network. Ninety percent of the region’s electricity needs are met by hydroelectric, solar, nuclear, and wind power. City-owned cars and buses run on gas made from such pickings as chicken manure, wastewater sludge, household compost, or ethanol. Hybrid cars and trucks patrol the streets, bicycles abound, and low-energy streetlights glow warmly in the dark. Without stinting on warmth or abandoning their cars, the people of Kalmar are proudly drawing 65 percent of their energy from completely renewable sources.

To achieve this, the changeover is happening at every level, in big companies and in small kitchens and living rooms. Many homes and other buildings rely on environmentally friendly district heating. The Soda Cell wood pulp mill, previously known for making oil heaters, switched to renewable furnaces and heat pumps (doubling its sales in the process). Before, the company used to dump its hot wastewater into cooling ponds and release vast clouds of steam into the frosty air. Now it harnesses the steam to drive turbines and the hot wastewater to fill furnace pipes—providing electricity and heat, not only to its own plant, but to twenty thousand homes in a nearby town.

Ideally, every home in the city would have solar panels and electric cars. Kalmar’s lofty goal, a community project, is to rid itself of all fossil fuels by 2030. Then, relying on gas, diesel, and oil will be a bygone folly. That’s a practical dream with pipes, not a pipe dream, even if it won’t happen overnight. “It’s important to have small victories,” says Bosse Lindholm, who manages Kalmar’s sustainability efforts. “It’s more important to go in the right direction at a slow speed than in the wrong direction at high speed.” Lindholm feels sure the Kalmar model would work elsewhere, “because the challenge isn’t technological, it’s changing the way people think.”

Not far from Kalmar, a dazzling otherworldly mirrored dish perches aloft like a UFO, its landing legs extended. As if to kindle a giant bonfire or torch distant ships, Ripasso Energy has erected the parabolic mirror to catch and magnify the sun, which drives the pistons of a Stirling engine that, as the company’s spokesman explains, is “a contraption invented by a Scottish priest in the early 1800s and then further developed by Swedish submarine manufacturer Kockums.” The result is a world-record-setting blast of solar energy, the most efficient thus far. Comparing this design to China’s Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric plant in the world, Tore Svensson from Ripasso points out that Three Gorges requires a thousand times more land to generate the same amount of energy. Ripasso’s plants produce a hundred thousand gleaming sun-catching mitts a year, which provide as much energy as five nuclear power plants.

I’m spotlighting the Swedes because they’re working with such limited raw material, wickedly little sun, and yet they’ve cooked up all sorts of brilliant designs. The lesson is: you don’t need bright sun if you have bright ideas and a culture that promotes them.

Central Station’s heat sharing and the eco-hubs in the countryside are just pieces of Sweden’s larger sustainability jigsaw puzzle, in which a particularly striking piece is how the country handles its waste. In Sweden, a whopping 99 percent of household refuse is recycled or used to generate energy. Only a dash of it goes into landfills; the rest is scrupulously collected and burned in incinerators with state-of-the-art filters, which generates electricity for a quarter of a million homes and furnishes heat for 20 percent of the country’s heating grid. There’s just one problem. The Swedes aren’t producing enough waste to keep the generators burning. The odd-sounding solution is that Sweden imports eight hundred thousand tons of trash each year from Norway and elsewhere in Europe. Norway pays Sweden to dispose of its trash, and Sweden reaps more electricity and heat. Norway’s trash isn’t always pristine (whose is), so, not wanting to add pollutants to its shores, Sweden captures toxic chemicals and metals from the ashes and ships those back to fill Norwegian landfills. Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark also import waste from other countries to keep their incinerators churning out electricity.

We’re just beginning to explore the frontiers of harvesting novel sources of fuel. Consider skimming energy from train travel, based on the principle of the pinwheel. As trains pass, a sirocco of hot, jumpy winds follows, spinning up dust devils and chasing newspapers down the platform. They might be blowing from North Africa across the Mediterranean to Southern Europe. I could do something with that tugs gently at the mind, in the same spirit that some ancestor, inspired by how an animal track holds water, thought I could use one of those. Leveraging the wind, three South Korean designers, Hong Sun Hye, Ryu Chan Hyeon, and Sinhyung Cho, have found a way to use the whoosh of trains to power cities. Their “Wind Tunnel” is a network of underground subway lines that capture the wind roiled up by passing trains and funnel it to turbines and generators embedded in the subway walls. Above ground, there’d be less traffic coughing and guzzling if more commuters relied on trains, and below ground, in the arterial hum of the city, Wind Tunnels would flute electricity to apartments and offices.

China, home to a vast network of high-speed trains, is also tempted by wind-catchers. If the idea fits well there, it may be because pinwheels have figured in Chinese culture and temples for thousands of years as powerful symbols of turning one’s luck around by casting out bad fortune and gusting in good. Hidden between the railway ties, wind turbines would funnel electricity into a well for the energy grid, which the trains tap, completing the circle.

Or here’s another way to reuse train power: bank it. As I drive around town in my aging Prius, I know that whenever I push on the brakes it banks electricity into its battery. During low-speed driving, it milks the stored power, and it burns gas only at high speed on the highways. This spending and saving balances well, and I rarely buy gas. In Philadelphia, the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority joined forces with Viridity Energy to create hybrid subways with the same thrift. Each time a train brakes around a curve or entering a station, it deposits energy into a big battery connected to a shared grid.

Worldwide, in such ways, the outdated idea of travel serving only to carry people from one place to another is gradually melting into the notion of piggybacking and recycling—transportation with bonuses. This pertains to cars and buses, of course, with companies aiming for ever greater mileage on ever less fuel of a preferably renewable sort such as hydrogen or electricity. A new twist on that is the Green Apple concept car, so named because it’s designed for use as a taxi in New York City, offering “street hails” in all five boroughs. Not adding to the carbon footprint, it could actually erase part of it. A three-seater shaped like an aerodynamic space helmet, it’s powered by turbines that whip in polluted air and purify it before exhaling it back onto the street. A snarky air-scrubber. Remember riding on the vacuum cleaner Mom or Dad propelled? Yes, the air could be called what it is, “recycled waste,” but where’s the fun in that?

Speaking of fun, some wind-harvesting ideas look like they’ve sprung from either an aviary or pages of sci-fi. I have several favorites at the moment. One is Windstalk, created by the New York firm Atelier DNA to provide clean energy for Masdar City, Abu Dhabi. A work of “land art,” it aims to provide wind energy while fluttering, oscillating, vibrating, and generally behaving “as chaotically as possible,” and also being beautiful. The gentle, incantatory winds of an otherworldy oasis infuse the designers’ description with irresistible hints of lounging and longing:

Our project starts out as a desire, a whisper, like grasping at straws, clenching water. Our project takes clues from the way the wind sways a field of wheat, or reeds in a marsh.… Our project consists of 1203 stalks, 55 meters high, anchored on the ground with concrete bases.… The top 50 cm of the poles are lit up by an LED lamp that glows and dims depending on how much the poles are swaying in the wind. When there is no wind… the lights go dark… When it rains, the rain water slides down the slopes of the bases to collect in the spaces between, concentrating scarce water. Here, plants can grow wild.… You can lean on the slopes, lie down, stay awhile and listen to the sound the wind makes as it rushes between the poles. But our project isn’t just desire.

Another of my favorites, in contrast, won’t sing and dance in the desert like Windstalk. It’s more like a sweaty air-cooled wallflower. On the lawn at the Technology University in Delft, I spy what looks for all the world like a time portal, a large sleek steel rectangular window frame hovering in the air, but not quivering in the cool spring breeze. Because it stands outside the Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science building, you’d be forgiven for thinking it resembled a dot-matrix zero. It might be a futuristic sculpture. Yet it’s a bladeless, bird-friendly, bat-friendly wind turbine, designed by TU Delft and Wageningen UR, the architecture firm Mecanoo, and a consortium of others as part of a government alternative-energy project. At this stage only a pioneering prototype, it promises a way to reshape wind power into electricity, despite having no moving parts, casting no intermittent shadows, creating no bone-twitching vibrations, and making none of the risen-zombie sounds reported near traditional three-bladed wind turbines coating the flanks of Andalusia or Cape Cod. No wonder passing students stare and instinctively smile, perhaps thinking as I do: How did you say again that works?

Fortunately, Dhiradj Djairam and Johan Smit, two Delft professors who helped design the technology, can tell me. Technically, it’s a windmill, designed to produce power by milling the wind, a famous part of Dutch tradition—but without moving blades. “Wind energy is converted to electrical energy by letting the wind move charged particles against the direction of an electric field,” Djairam explains.

A fluid steel frame encircles horizontal tubes, arranged like venetian blinds, that create tiny electrically charged water droplets. As the droplets are born and rapidly blown away by the wind, they scratch out an electrical current that can flow into a city’s energy grid. Round, square, or rectangular, standing alone atop a tall wind-whipped building or in regimental rows along the coast, these “ewicon windconverters” may become vanishingly familiar the way TV aerials do, but for a while anyway they’ll appear wondrous as giant bubble-blowing wands. Or as time portals to a future where, by entangled logic, you remain yourself with all of your individual quirks and foibles, plus the savvy and ignorance of our age, and yet sense how future Earthlings live, surrounded by and largely oblivious to a phantasmagoria of techno-wonders that are as commonplace to them as ours seem to us. What sources of renewable energy will they have mastered? How will they corral the wind and drive the chariots of the sun?

Imagine Olivine, our future geologist, standing on the shore of a sea, in the heart of a metropolis or in low orbit, and looking back at our age. Those early Anthrops, she thinks. How did they live with so much illness, and so many natural disasters, while polluting all over themselves? And why did it take them so long to discover—here you can fill in the blanks—the heliocopter, the bladeless wind-thresher, the hydrogen Coupe de Ville?

Meanwhile, TU Delft is working on other forms of airborne windpower, including a “ladder mill,” which is really a string of kites whose blades ride the high winds aloft. “If we move away from the idea that a turbine ought to have a steel foot,” Djairam says, “we can harvest this wind for our electricity supply.”

When it comes to reaping energy from the eye-scalding powerhouse of the sun, we’ve only begun to explore its promise of beneficent fury. Over the millennia, humankind has worshipped the sun, and with good reason, but these days we rarely pause to marvel at how it charms our existence. It reaches into the mumbling corners of our private universe, spurs growth, sheds light on all our episodes and exploits, transfigures daily life. Its edible rays feed the green plants on land and sea, which animals graze upon, and we dine upon in turn, and so it quivers through our blood. Every molecule of our being, every mote inside us, every atom and eave in the mansion of the body and the penumbra of the mind was forged in some early chaos of a sun. It’s only in death that our long conversation with the sun ends. Other elements in our world may trace their origin to lesser luminaries—the gold we mine, for instance, to a sparkling bombardment of asteroids two hundred million years ago. But the sun’s breath made all of life possible.

You’d think that would be enough for one species of upright ape, but we rack our sun-smelted brains to find newer ways to capture and enslave the sun to power the rest of our lives. We’ve been exploiting it throughout the Anthropocene whenever we’ve burned fuel—really a form of buried sunlight—to warm ourselves and power our empires. The Industrial Revolution always was about solar power. Now we’re just skipping the secondhand part and going straight to the wellspring of that fuel. Wood, coal, oil, and gas were only intermediaries after all, and using them was a sign of our immaturity as a species.

Sweden’s Ripasso Energy is not the only endeavor beginning to excel at solar power, even if it’s not yet as profitable as fossil fuels. It will be, because it must be, and soon, if we’re to survive all of our masterpieces and conquests. In Nevada, Ivanpah, the world’s largest solar thermal facility, already stretches to the horizon in the Mojave Desert. And it should. America receives as much sunshine as light-spangled Spain, the sunniest country in Europe and the world’s leader in concentrated solar power. In the coming years, Desertec, a far-reaching $400 billion project, plans to harvest solar energy from Africa’s sun-drenched deserts and pipe it to the world. Ample sunlight falls on North Africa each day to power the whole continent, as well as Europe, and Desertec’s ultimate goal is to collect enough sunshine in deserts to power the entire planet.

In Germany, solar panels line rooftops like glossy guitar picks, sparkle with pent-up power beside the railways, spangle like beaded frocks on the hillsides, escort cars along the autobahns, stand on stalks and peer up at the sky like sunflowers. They’re everywhere one looks, pulsing from inner-city apartments to barns and old abandoned military bases. In the Gut Erlasee Solar Park, where straggling weeds climb between the panels, threatening to shade them, a maintenance crew of grazing sheep dutifully prunes the intruders. In the southern German state of Bavaria, home to 12.5 million people, three solar panels take up residence for every human. While Germany doesn’t get an enormous amount of direct sunlight, on one prismatically sunny day in May 2012, it harnessed 22 gigawatts of energy from the sun—as much bottled lightning as twenty nuclear power plants could create, half of all the solar energy being collected around the world that day.

Thanks to shrewd legislation passed in 1991, including financial incentives and widespread support from a citizenry well tutored in the need for renewables, Germany has become a world leader, harvesting wind, water, and sun power for a quarter of its energy needs, with solar providing the lion’s share, and German companies spearheading solar technology research and design. The sun’s rays may be free, but they’re not cheap to use. Solar energy still costs more than fossil fuels or nuclear energy, but prices have fallen 66 percent since 2006, making it obvious that trained sunbeams will soon be as affordable as coal. Meanwhile, solar research is heavily subsidized by the government and also heavily backed by investors. But even without government subsidies, solar energy is flourishing in India and Italy, and China is surfing the solar energy wave with such flair that some German tech companies are being eclipsed by suddenly plummeting prices. Ideally, every home would have solar panels and affordable fully electric cars that could be plugged into the sun, a molten socket that stretches 92,960,000 miles.

Many communities and countries around the world are finding creative new ways to harvest and reuse energy, but most grassroots initiatives aren’t covered by the media; even though they may be life-changing locally, to the rest of the world they’re invisible. Dayak villagers in Borneo are replacing their diesel generators with hydrogen ones and hydroelectric energy (from streams) to power their lives. In Curitiba, Brazil, once crippled by traffic, 70 percent of commuters now travel by bus, saving twenty-seven million liters of fuel a year and lowering air pollution.

Climate change has become so visible, and wildlife and fresh water so much scarcer, that fewer people are foolish enough to deny the evidence. As we wade into the Anthropocene, we’re trying to reinsert ourselves back into the planet’s ecosystem and good graces. Unlovely as the word “sustainability” may be, it’s sashaying through the media, taking root in schools, and hitting home in all sorts of domiciles, entering the mainstream in both hamlets and megacities. We’re undergoing a revolution in thinking that isn’t a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, nor is it a back-to-the-land movement of the sort that became popular during the Great Depression and again in the 1970s. We might sometimes resemble startled deer in the headlights as we face Earth’s dwindling resources, yet at the same time we’re opening a door to a full-scale sustainability revolution. Our fundamental ideas about house and city have begun evolving into the smarter, greener matrix of our survival.