Big Ideas

About this time every year THE NEW YORK TIMES comes out with its "Year in Ideas" issue of the Sunday magazine. The newspaper has put it together for eight years, and I don't think I've missed one.

The Sunday TIMES is our morning ritual, our journalistic window to the world. It arrives at the end of our driveway around dawn, and soon after I retrieve it, I'm sitting in my chair working my way through the news toward the Book Review and the magazine.  

This week the cover of the magazine is red, and there's a yellow and orange image of Einstein sticking out his tongue in the middle.

New ideas are like that picture of Einstein. They seem a little bit shocking and absurd at first. And yet soon-if they are adopted and pressed into wide use¬-there is something familiar and necessary about them. About nine years ago an editor in New York probably said, "Hey, I got an idea. Why don't we do a whole issue of the Sunday magazine on the newest ideas?"

I decided to do a little survey of this issue. There are a large number of "green ideas" among the 60 or so gathered from our world culture's expanding edges. Here are a few of the new ideas that might (or might not) catch on and somehow make an impact on the way we live our lives:

This year, Mike Brickley began working on a prototype of the Brickley Engine, a way of reducing friction in an internal-combustion engine by 35 percent, thus producing 20 percent better gas mileage. If Detroit embraced Brickley's engine it would reduce greenhouse gas significantly.

The Carbon Penance is a way for all of us to lift the "free-floating guilt" that might come from warming up the planet. For paying the penance a Swiss-born artist-inventor built a translucent leg band that tracks your electricity consumption.  When the device detects that power consumption has reached a threshold, stainless steel spikes are pressed into your leg. Ouch. I don't think that's such a good idea!

The Cloth Car is an invention of BMW. It's a car whose shell is a light polyurethane Lycra that's strong and waterproof. Cloth cars are less expensive and more energy-efficient. BMW is only using the cloth car as a concept vehicle, so we shouldn't expect to see them on I-85 anytime soon.

One of my favorite ideas of the year comes from Tel Aviv, where the mayor enlisted a veterinarian to fix his problem of dog poop on the streets. The vet and mayor developed the world's first forensic dog-poop DNA unit to locate the dogs (and owners by association) who leave their pet waste untended. The dog-poop DNA bank contains 100 samples.

And from Australia comes the idea to "Eat Kangaroos to Fight Global Warming." A member of the Australian Wildlife Services has calculated that if his country could reduce the number of cattle and sheep (primary producers of methane) and increase the methane-free kangaroo population then they could see a reduction of 16 megatons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

If you don't like the idea of eating kangaroos rather than cows, maybe you'll go for Minicattle. The average cow weighs 1,300 pounds, which means lots of beef, but also lots of waste and the need for more space. Now there are minibreeds, petite models of our regular Angus and Herefords. These small cattle consume less feed, and their productivity per acre is twice as much as their big cousins. They are also more docile, making them favorites of children.

This year's biggest idea came from Ecuador, which became the first country to give constitutional rights to nature. Seventy percent of the voters of that South American country granted nature "the right to the maintenance of regeneration of its vital cycles, structures, functions and evolutionary processes." This year the Spanish Parliament also granted the right to be spared  "abuse, torture and death" to great apes. Both great ideas, I believe.

So what will these ideas mean for us in the upcountry? We'll just have to wait and see if Einstein is sticking out his tongue to mock or praise the year's inventors of our future.