AP Seminar: EOC B Practice #1 (Fixed)

You see that, after a thing is dead, it dries up. It might take weeks or years, but eventually, if you touch the thing, it crumbles under your fingers. It goes back to dust. The soul of the thing has long since departed. With the plants and wild game the soul may have already been born back into bones and blood or thick green stalks and leaves. Nothing is wasted. What cannot be eaten by people or in some way used must then be left where other living creatures may benefit. What domestic animals or wild scavengers can’t eat will be fed to the plants. The plants feed on the dust of these few remains.... . . . Archaeologists have remarked over formal burials complete with elaborate funerary objects excavated in trash middens of abandon rooms. But the rocks and adobe mortar of collapsed walls were valued by the ancient people, because each rock had been carefully selected for size and shape, then chiseled to an even face. Even the pink clay adobe melting with each rainstorm had to be prayed over, then dug and carried to some distance. Corn-cob and husks, the rinds and stalks and animal bones were not regarded by the ancient people as filth or garbage. The remains were merely resting at a midpoint in their journey back to dust.... The dead become dust, and in this becoming they are once more joined with the Mother. The ancient Pueblo people called the earth the Mother Creator of all things in this world. Her sister, the Corn Mother, occasionally merges with her because all succulent green life rises out of the depths of the earth.

[A] group of artists organized various initiatives linked to the founding of the Dumpster Divers in 1992. This association took its name from the practice of rummaging through the garbage of private individuals and commercial enterprises in search of salvageable things: food, clothing, books, information. Dumpstering, along with curbing (salvaging furniture and appliances abandoned on the sidewalks of American cities), may be a spontaneous reaction to the sight of something useful in a garbage can. It may also be a radical rejection of consumer society, an act aimed at protecting the environment, or even a skill developed by individuals who have no other means of procuring food and clothing. Because garbage containers are usually located on private property and dumpster diving is considered illegal in some parts of the US, an ample literature has emerged to address its legal aspects. For example, the police and other agencies have the right to make use of information gathered in this way. John Hoffman, the controversial “guru of garbage” and author of The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving (1993) and Dumpster Diving: The Advanced Course: How to Turn Other People’s Trash into Money, Publicity, and Power (2002), radically altered the perception of garbage recycling in the national American consciousness. What was seen in the early ’90s as the last resort of a desperate, down-and-out population is now recognized as a field of experimentation for artists, activists, and enterprising freethinkers who dig things out and reuse them, in part to stem the general, immoderate waste of resources. In an interview, Hoffman explains that his parents taught him the dumpster-diving lifestyle. Beset by economic problems, they were forced to use cast-off furniture, electrical appliances, books, and food for themselves and their children. Far from procuring only the minimum needs, they found themselves living a strangely opulent lifestyle. According to Hoffman, his parents had imitated systems of survival devised by great numbers of Americans during the Depression. Hoffman’s story, however, suggests a more recent source of inspiration: the lifestyle practices of members of the ’60s and ’70s counterculture. The origins of both dumpster diving and garbage art appear to lie in the ideological and experimental ferment of those years. Take, for example, the Dumpster Divers of Philadelphia, who helped to create the Please Take Materials Exchange in 1998. Initially described as a museum, the exchange is a depository for discarded objects and materials collected by the participants or donated by various government agencies and corporations in greater Philadelphia: paper, artists’ materials, light bulbs, medical equipment, textiles, electronics, etc. A membership fee gives artists access to the materials. The Divers also coined the word garbitrage to define this process by which their members use garbage as currency. These practices are reminiscent of some of the initiatives of the Diggers, a radical group based in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the mid-60s. . . . [T]he Diggers distributed free food in the panhandle of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, serving stews made with donated or stolen meat and vegetables. At the same time, they opened a large number of Free Stores in which all the goods on display, used but in good condition, could be taken (or given) without payment.

A man who has at length found something to do will not need to get a new suit to do it in; for him the old will do, that has lain dusty in the garret for an indeterminate period. Old shoes will serve a hero longer than they have served his valet—if a hero ever has a valet—bare feet are older than shoes, and he can make them do. Only they who go to soireés and legislative balls must have new coats, coats to change as often as the man changes in them. But if my jacket and trousers, my hat and shoes, are fit to worship God in, they will do; will they not? Who ever saw his old clothes—his old coat, actually worn out, resolved into its primitive elements, so that it was not a deed of charity to bestow it on some poor boy, by him perchance to be bestowed on some poorer still, or shall we say richer, who could do with less? I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. The loon retires to solitary ponds to spend it. Thus also the snake casts its slough, and the caterpillar its wormy coat, by an internal industry and expansion; for clothes are but our outmost cuticle and mortal coil. Otherwise we shall be found sailing under false colors, and be inevitably cashiered at last by our own opinion, as well as that of mankind. We don garment after garment, as if we grew like exogenous plants by addition without. Our outside and often thin and fanciful clothes are our epidermis, or false skin, which partakes not of our life, and may be stripped off here and there without fatal injury; our thicker garments, constantly worn, are our cellular integument, or cortex; but our shirts are our liber, or true bark, which cannot be removed without girdling and so destroying the man. I believe that all races at some seasons wear something equivalent to the shirt. It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly that, if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety. While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars, which will last as many years, thick pantaloons for two dollars, cowhide boots for a dollar and a half a pair, a summer hat for a quarter of a dollar, and a winter cap for sixty-two and a half cents, or a better be made at home at a nominal cost, where is he so poor that, clad in such a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?

Though biomimicry has inspired human innovations for decades—one of the most often-cited examples is Velcro, which the Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral patented in 1955 after studying how burs stuck to his clothes—better technology and more nuanced research have enabled increasingly complex adaptions. Design software created by German researcher Claus Mattheck—and used in Opel and Mercedes cars—reflects the ways trees and bones distribute strength and loads. A fan created by Pax Scientific borrows from the patterns of swirling kelp, nautilus and whelks to move air more efficiently. A saltwater-irrigated greenhouse in the Qatari desert will use condensation and evaporation tricks gleaned from the nose of a camel. Now, thanks in part to continuing innovations in nanoscale fabrication, manufacturers are bringing an expanding array of products to market. Biomimicry isn’t itself a product but a process, drawing on natural organisms and processes in order to spark innovation. Organizations and even cities can look to ecosystems for inspiration, says Tim McGee, a biologist and member of Biomimicry 3.8, a Montana-based consultancy. In Lavasa—described as “India’s first planned hill city” by its developers, who hope to eventually build homes for more than 300,000 people there—the guild consulted with landscape architects. Thus the planting strategy included deciduous trees, forming a canopy to catch, and then reflect, through evaporation, nearly a third of the monsoon rain that hits it. That effect acts “like an engine that drives the monsoon inland,” says McGee, which helps prevent drought there. The hydrodynamically efficient shape of banyan tree leaves influenced the design of a better water-dispatching roof shingle, while water divertment systems were inspired by the ways harvester ants direct water away from their nests. The first Lavasa “town” has been completed, with four more projected to follow by 2020. Everyone’s talking about ways to reduce the human footprint, or to get to “net zero” impact. But nature, says McGee, usually goes one step further: “It’s almost never net zero—the output from that system is usually beneficial to everything around it.” What if we could build our cities the same way? “What if, in New York City, when it rained, the water that went into the East River was cleaner than when it fell?” And what if, when forests caught fire, the flames could be extinguished by means that didn’t depend on toxic substances? “Nature creates flame retardants that are nontoxic,” notes McGee. “Why can’t we?” For years researchers have focused on the chemistry of flame retardants, without results. But perhaps natural processes could offer some path to innovation in the laboratory, McGee says. Maybe it’s the way jack-pine cones open in the face of heat (to allow reproduction even as fire destroys the forest), or the way eucalyptus trees shed scattered pieces of quick-burning bark to suck up oxygen and take fire away from the main trunk. Jaime Grunlan, a mechanical engineer at Texas A&M, has developed a fire-resistant fabric that uses chitosan, a renewable material taken from lobster and shrimp shells (and a chemical relative of the chitin in butterflies’ wings), to create a nanolayer polymer coating that, when exposed to heat, produces a carbon “shell” that protects the fabric.