I HAVE the kindliest feelings for a wily academic who can create a 3D-printed teapot out of powdered tea. Better yet, Ronald Rael, a visionary architecture professor at the University of California’s beautiful Berkeley campus, made that fine object into a , the archetype of 3D printing that every student of the field admires.

Rael has an architect’s morality, believing you should design and construct well-built structures that are sturdy, useful and pleasing to the senses. Like many architects – Rem Koolhaas in cold war Berlin, for instance – he is alarmed by the oppression and ugliness of border walls. Scholars don’t get more inventive than Rael and I wanted to like his book rather more than I did.

Border walls exist to intimidate, discommode, exploit or even kill people. The Great Wall of China may have grown into a national icon, but working walls are ramshackle and ugly and they commonly fail: remember

Borderwall As Architecture goes into keen scholarly detail on the walls at the US-Mexico border. Rael is particularly upset about those in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. I have been there myself, and he is right, there is plenty to complain about.

If you have never heard how many migrants die of thirst in the deserts of the south-west US, or about the huge cost of the wall per metre, or how walls harm desert wildlife, or what a drag it is to be a US Border Patrol officer, you will learn a lot from this book.

The part of the book I should have most enjoyed is a series of paper-architecture interventions that might make the wall more humane. I quite like “architecture fiction”, and, being a science-fiction writer, I’m quite happy to see someone ignore budget constraints in pursuit of the sense of wonder. So when Rael proposes turning the US-Mexican wall into a long, narrow marijuana farm, I get the joke. The cannabis trade is obviously a major issue at the Mexican border. If the wall itself was the peaceful source of all that marijuana it could pay for itself!

“Walls are ramshackle and ugly and they commonly fail: remember the legendary Maginot Line?”

Rael offers many such concepts in the book, which often have a whimsy about them that reminds me of . But they don’t advance the debate in the way that I suspect Rael imagines they will. If you are an anti-narco, pro-wall person and you are presented with a subversive conundrum of this kind, the mockery hardens your position. From a wall enthusiast, you become a polarised wall fundamentalist. You will build new walls just to spite humanistic Californian intellectuals like Rael.

Rael is too decorative. He is riffing on architectural solutions when planet-wide dynamics of terror, resentment and depression have, to take another example, already created a brand-new border wall around part of the French port town of Calais to keep migrants out of the UK.

Rael ends his book by expressing his dismayed astonishment that Donald Trump was elected US president on a pro-wall campaign. Before that election Rael’s book might have felt prescient, liberating and forward-looking. Now it is hard not to read it as the relic of an kinder bygone era.

A manifesto is commonly a sheet of paper glued to a wall. As the walls multiply, many more manifestos will be needed, and they are going to have to engage people on a practical level. You would be surprised how long such a manifesto can last, and how fast a wall can crumble.

This article appeared in print under the headline “A wall to end all walls”

“Cybernetic feedback was Darwin-scale high concept, an intellectual gift that would keep on giving“

All-purpose plaster

“The ambassadors of Google and Facebook… are as fond of snake oil as their grandparents were“

Soil erosion is one of Earth’s most pressing problems (Image: Fabio Cuttica/Contrasto/Eyevine)

BEFORE 2008, “next economy” books were a dime a dozen. They’ve been thin on the ground lately, but John Thackara has just published one of a decidedly different bent.

An incessant traveller, thoughtful listener and the former “symposiarch” of the legendary Doors of Perception events of the 1990s, Thackara is a beloved figure in sustainable-design circles. A guru of labs and think tanks worldwide, he is painfully aware of the crises facing the world in 2015.

Most new-economics gurus would crassly motivate their readers to get rich quick online. By contrast, in How to Thrive in the Next Economy, Thackara tackles our planet’s most basic survival topics – preserving soil from erosion, supplying clean water and keeping people sheltered, fed, healthy and mobile. There’s a light dusting of digital here, but for the most part, the author sternly confronts every major environmental issue that has worsened in his lifetime.

As Earth’s situation gets more perilous, we don’t wise up and reform, we just embrace our myths ever more tightly. So Thackara sees little promise in political solutions. Likewise, private enterprise cannot do much because it is laced into a fatal straitjacket of optimising return on investment, even if that means levelling forests and blackening skies.

“As Earth’s situation gets more perilous, we don’t reform, we just embrace our myths more tightly”

Thackara’s inconvenient mathematics expose our planet’s decline, but despite his ill-concealed dread he stoutly refuses to “head for the hills with a truckload of guns and peanut butter”. That prospect obviously tempts him, but a guru should not become a doomsayer and abandon the world. Somehow, humans must “thrive”, although by Thackara’s reckoning, thrive means surviving with about 5 per cent of the energy and resources most Westerners avidly consume.

It’s hard to talk rich, heavily armed people into sacrificing 95 per cent of everything they have grabbed, but Thackara thinks that it is necessary, physically possible and a praiseworthy moral effort.

His book is full of examples of people who already manage such a pared-down life: Lagos kiosk traders, Indian jugaad tinkerers, Central American cooperative farmers, Danish bike sharers and the like. These marginal, sociable groups seem obscure and humble, mostly because they tend to avoid the focused, malignant attention of governments and markets.

So, argues Thackara, if these ingenious refuseniks haven’t been methodically crushed by our dominant, ill-conceived legal and financial systems, others might indeed thrive, or at least do better by copying their thrifty ways.

In my own wanderings, I have also encountered under-the-radar activist groups, such as Brazilian Gambiologia tech-art hackers and Serbian pirate street-marketeers. So I share Thackara’s awareness that “material poverty” is a relative thing. If you’ve got a few thousand calories along with a dry spot to sleep, a backpacker’s simplicity is not as bad as bankers would have you believe.

In fact, I’m quite a fan of Thackara’s bonhomie, ingenuity and can-do designer abilities; if the two of us were marooned on a desert island, I bet we would have a rather jolly time of it. However, as Henry David Thoreau found out beside Walden Pond, the worst problem with noble simplicity isn’t the lack of cash, status and shiny appliances. It’s the monotony.

Even if this “thriving” life is doable, where’s the aspiration, the ambition, the raw possibility? They’ve all been trimmed back by 95 per cent, because bold swagger and transformational technology will no longer do on the wounded surface of our fragile planet.

Anyone reading Thackara’s book will certainly get a much improved idea about what genuine 21st-century mass poverty will look like. It will be crowded, chatty and socially networked, yet still very poor, and with no ladders upward.

It will also be very threatened, because any angry gang of mountain bandits with Toyota trucks and machine guns could easily conquer a peaceable eco-village co-op.

As for states and markets, their power and malignity isn’t withering away, it’s intensifying. The radical niche and attic life Thackara is describing here is being crushed by most powers that be rather than ignored or encouraged, much less allowed to sweep over us in a vast wave of profound transformation.

Frankly I wonder whether humans deserve a position in a thriving economy. Given our résumé as a species, who would hire us? Any wise, sceptical alien would notice that plankton, grass, ants and termites all do a much better job at saving Earth than humans. If we raucous anthropoids really want to save a planet, we should probably try to upgrade Mars or Venus, low-rent planets that we weren’t born on.

If we could sit still in our rooms like coral polyps, we wouldn’t be killing the coral reefs. But we are killing them, and troubled spirits like ourselves will never rest content with what we ought or ought not to do. This book is a thoughtful plan for a better and very different world, but it’s one that we don’t deserve, can’t have and won’t get.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Are we worthy?”