The day was calm. The waves that lapped the shore were small, almost lazy; they were the waves of shallow waters, not of the open ocean. A ruddy sun shone in the hazy sky. The slow stream that came down to the foreshore rippled a little in the light wind, and the pebbles tumbled here and there without much energy. Drama was not wholly absent, for along the skyline all but lost in the distance were two or three volcanic cones. They were quiet just now, but a walk along the beach would soon bring a traveler to a stretch of all but impassable lava, where once, not so long back, the molten rock had oozed and hissed into the waters from an inland fissure. It would happen again, but no one could foresee just where and when the encounter would take place. The day was calm and the scene was lonely. The beach was devoid of shells. No flies buzzed; nothing at all hopped or crawled along the water's edge. No birds flew; no fish swam in the sea; no clawed creatures scuttled below the tidal waters. The rocky lands inward from the sea were utterly barren of life. Neither lizards nor mice could be found, and neither a tree nor a blade of grass spread green blades to the sunshine. Yet life was present, even abundant, in the scene. It grew everywhere that the shallow waters brimmed out to dry land: dense knobs and sheets of algae and bacteria covered all the shallows, out into the bay and up the stream toward the higher lands. That life was never out of touch with water; it never survives higher than a matter of inches from moisture. Inland, here and there, a few dry old knobs could be found, quite whitened, rocklikea growing mat of the only life in this quiet land, stranded forever by some shift in the watercourse. Modem structures formed by microbial mats found in Australia are analogous to structures formed by ancient microbial mats billions of years ago in a similar environment. Photo courtesy of J. W. Schopf Vlll Just such a scenewe can infer the details rather well from the complex fabric of the rock sampleswould present itself at the spot, now the western coast of Australia, where the oldest trace of life in all the Earth is found. The time is long ago indeed, a time we can estimate to within a few percent from a secure, mutually confirming set of radioactive decay measurements. The signs of copious algal life, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the same forms found throughout the record of the rocks up to the present day, occur almost as early as the first dated rocks. One must emphasize that this teeming life, single-celled, though colonial in nature, was about all that lived on Earth, not only for the first pages of the record but for four-fifths of our whole past. Not until a time only 0.7 billion years (b.y.) back can we surely see any relic of life more mobile than the algal and bacterial mats. Indeed, they themselves become more complex in microstructure and more powerful in their chemistry over the 3 b.y. of their evolution and change. No life is mobile (beyond the drift of plankton) until about that time, 0.6...
Here Hattie Hartman, author of a significant new book London 2012: Sustainable Design: Delivering an Olympic Legacy, and Sustainability Editor of The Architects' Journal (AJ), argues sustainability's corner. Is there a danger that a new emphasis on scarcity per se fails to acknowledge the considerable inroads that have been made by design professionals and the construction industry in developing a more sustainable built environment? Should the complexity of low‐carbon building regulations and intimidating certification systems alone be sufficient reason to abandon a project that is showing signs of gaining ground and effectively disseminating its knowledge base?
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