Date:December 15, 2008 (Tue.) 16：00‐18：00PM
Venue: Meeting Room, the 3rd floor, Inamori Foundation Memorial Hall
Presentation:
Hiroyuki Yano (Professor, RISH)
It is important today, when the population is growing, and where consumption is expanding along with it, to reexamine our society’s dependence on oil resources and build a society based on solar energy. For that purpose, the first thing we must do is to utilize biomass, in particular, woody biomass, which accounts for 90% or more of biomass.
Wood is lightweight but strong. One experiment showed that a single fiber of pulp can withstand a load of 1.7 GPa. In addition, it was shown through an experiment on the central pillar of the five-storied pagoda of Horyuji Temple that the strength remained nearly unchanged even after 2000 years. Further, wood has a small coefficient of thermal expansion. While pulp consists of nanofibers with a width of just 10 nanometers, this characteristic has not been fully utilized. The development of nanotechnology during the last 10 years or so has opened the way for the manufacturing of nanofibers into material for products.
Examples of such products include cars made from plants (which can help to reduce carbon dioxide emission through their light weight), televisions or flexible computer substrates made from nata de coco, and other products. The presenter claimed that what scientists do to create these technologies is just 1 %. Wood (living matter) constitutes 99% or more of these technologies. As a scientis he tries to enter the feelings of trees, accept it, and develop its potential. This scientific method (J science) which involves respecting all living things and borrowing their power, is something that should be disseminated to and shared with the rest of the world.
The commentator, invoking ecological anthropologist T. Ingold, raised the question. From Ingold’s viewpoint, there is a serious gap between the spherical perspective (where human beings are embedded in and integrated with the environment) and the global perspective (where human beings are disembedded from the environment). Following him, the commentator asked what the presenter, or GCOE for that matter, was aiming for, and suggested that we should consider changing the nature of the car-centered society. In addition, he pointed out problems with the use of biomass resources for energy (that it is distributed energy with very low energy density, and that CO2 will be emitted when converting wet peatlands to bioethanol production). Further, perspectives on “Futurability,” which the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature has proposed as an idea to replace sustainability, and of “reproductive consilience” (a concept of E.O. Wilson) toward it were explained.
From the floor, questions associated with the actual technologies (how to make them beneficial not only for big corporations but also for local residents, and how to prevent the cost reduction from leading to increased consumption). and the ways to learn the logic of the biosphere were raised.
At this seminar, we caught a glimpse of the future direction for science and technology that GCOE seeks, largely as a fruit of interactions between researchers in the natural sciences and humanities. We hope to see further development.
(Shuhei Kimura)