Tinkering with the Earth

‛The working title was geo-engineering, but that word means nothing to most people’, begins Tomas van den Heuvel, curator of the Design Museum in Den Bosch. And so it became Design for the Planet: an exhibition about the various ways in which humanity has attempted to bend landscape, weather, and ultimately the composition of the atmosphere to its will.

It fits rather neatly within the museum’s maverick approach. ‛We want to seek out the boundaries of what design is’, explains Van den Heuvel. ‛And this is a highly topical subject.’ By the latter, he is referring primarily to recent efforts to combat climate change. The exhibition features two impressive devices designed to absorb CO₂ from the air, and touches on various alternatives such as spreading olivine, ‛fertilising’ ocean water with iron salts intended to encourage algae growth, and burning sulphur in the stratosphere to create H₂SO₄ aerosols that block sunlight.

Catching sparrows

The story goes back much further, however. Redesign of the planet might have been an even better title. The exhibition opens with photographs of cultural landscapes that are, in essence, also a local form of geo-engineering. Early plans are on display for the reclamation of the Zuiderzee, in which the originators also wished to incorporate the entire Wadden Sea. Others wanted to dam the Mediterranean at Gibraltar as part of a project to green the Sahara. Not that anyone had the faintest notion of ecology at the time. Consider Chinese party chairman Mao, who pressed his people to catch sparrows so that they could no longer devour the grain — a plague of locusts would prove just how short-sighted this had been.

The Chinese are also the ones who still ‛seed’ clouds with dry ice or iodine salts to force water droplets into falling prematurely. Sometimes it even appears to work. Less convincing are ‛hail cannons’, with which market gardeners hope to shatter hailstones by vibration before they cause any damage. Naturally, there is a nod to the much-misunderstood inventor Wilhelm Reich, whose rain machines served as the inspiration for Kate Bush’s song Cloudbusting. Right, you won’t be getting that out of your head for the rest of the day.

Can you actually do this?

The exhibition is intended for a broad, design-minded public and therefore places the emphasis on the visual beauty of the projects on display. The underlying chemistry and physics are barely touched upon — hardly anyone would follow it anyway. This rather tells against the exhibition at its conclusion, when visitors are asked whether they are for or against geo-engineering. A tricky choice when, for instance, you know nothing about the energy consumption of the CO₂-capture technologies on show and can only judge on ethical grounds: is this something humanity ought to be doing at all?

A perfectly valid question, as it happens. But you could just as readily put it to the relentless pumping of CO₂ into the atmosphere. Pop upstairs and visit the exhibition on holiday travel currently showing one floor up, for instance. And shudder.