Toolkit for Designing a Sustainable Life

You wake up in the morning with the sun streaming through your window. You’re on the second floor of your house, in your bedroom. The frame of your house was built from two trees growing close together in your forest, since now humans have advanced to be able to direct the growing of two trees’ branches. Any dead wood in the house (on the flooring and the wall paneling) was made from construction offcut waste created when your grandparents were children. It’s mostly pine, the wood that they used at that time to build frames for buildings, engineered in a pleasing octagonal fractal pattern, which you were really into as a child. You, as do all of the children of your society, had a making class in your schedule every year, designed to help you learn how to build your dream home, piece by piece. Your parents set aside a space for you in the community when you were born, and you spend your youth learning how to build that space into what you want it to be, and how to do that without creating waste, and without using entirely new materials – especially how to use the waste from previous generations, which, they taught you, had been building up since the First Industrial Revolution (circa 1750AD), and had only been being reused and word down (get better words) starting around 2050, in an attempt to save the planet from climate change and free up land for residential life for the overgrown population. 150 years later, they were around 30% done with that process, in addition to the recycled material that was disposed of for recycling once more. So, your grandmother’s generation saw fit to modify the global culture to center the awareness of the history of the object, people, places and things that perdure, and develop ways to reduce your global impact as humans. Anyways…

The floor was your 5th year project, which, traditionally, is a collaboration between yourself and your parents/mentors/chosen guidance. (That’s something else you never understood about humans – despite naturally being communal animals, with organically built communities of mentorship and companionship, there was a good 200 years where only the biological parents of the kids raised them…? Confusing.) At this point, you’ve changed the color and finish of the floor a million times, and finally got a screen coating onto it, to be able to project any color, pattern, finish, and material you’re feeling, at any moment in time, as you grow older. 

But back to this morning. Your sheer curtains, made from recycled plastic woven by the silk worms that are able to eat and digest plastic from the landfills, color the sunlight a warm yellow. It’s nothing fancy, but the curtains belonged to your grandmother, and you keep them for sentimental value and because they fit your vintage/antique aesthetic. You roll over in your bed and grab your glasses. On your nightstand, which is growing out of the wall, made up of a few custom-grown branches from your most favorite oak tree, sits a glass of water (in a reused jar, of course!). You sit up and tap the side of your glasses, which pulls up a screen projection on any given surface, and you begin to look at the news.