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Sustainable Living Audio Book – Learn From Looking – Chapter 1: Part 1
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The author of Learn from Looking, Charlie Szoradi, has given us authorization to share the written content and drawings from his book with our readers. This is one of many segments that focuses on the overall theme of sustainable design and overall sustainable living.
Book Topic: Sustainable Living
Learn from Looking is about critical thinking and reaching a sustainable future more cost-effectively than ever imagined. The book's subtitle "How Observation Inspires Innovation" speaks to the core aspect of the content, given that the author, Charlie Szoradi, is an architect and inventor who has traveled extensively around the world over multiple decades and built businesses that range from energy saving lighting to indoor agriculture systems. Mr. Szoradi shares insights on "green" clean-technology that are increasingly key for sustainability, profitable businesses, healthy living, and raising intellectually curious children in a pre and post Covid-19 world. We give Learn from Looking five out of five green stars! Note that the audio book comes with the E-book for only $15 together. Click here to Order the Audio Book on Sustainable Living
Sample content from Learn from Looking:
Sustainable Observations: Twenty Years of Looking
From a very early age in grade school, I started drawing and documenting the world around me. Since then, international work and travel have provided very fortunate opportunities and access. This book is a means of sharing some of what I have seen and learned along the way.
To date, many authors have shared their ideas about sustainability, energy consumption, and the impact on our climate. Their works have been instrumental in bringing information to the forefront. This book is not about looking for a way to support a belief or strategy. This book is about the learning that has come from the looking. This book is also intended as a catalyst that may inspire others to document what they see and share their insights.
The excerpts from my travel sketches in part 2 of this book capture a long journey to different places around the world. There was not a scheduled or linear path that led to some of the commercial impact results in part 3, such as a sustainable smart home and an energy-intelligent lighting company. There was, however, always an underlying curiosity to look closer at how things work with an eye on how we might be able to use the findings as a springboard to shape a more sustainable modern world.
Many years after I started drawing these sketches in the field, I learned about Charles Darwin’s discovery process.[i] The process made sense to me at a core level. He apparently followed a guiding force to “Start looking, and learn from the looking, rather than looking for something.” In my research for this book, I could not attribute this quote to Darwin. I sought out the feedback from Darwin scholar and Harvard University professor Janet Browne. Professor Browne let me know that she doubted if this quote was from Charles Darwin, since she had never come across it before, and it did not sound like nineteenth-century prose. Regardless of the source or the exact language, the act of observation and recording enables one to see things that would not have otherwise been noticed. The written support text, which I have added to my drawings in this book, dates back in some cases twenty years to the time of the earliest drawings. Hopefully, the combination of images and words will help shed additional light on what I have seen across my travels.
Start looking, and learn from the looking, rather than looking for something.
Support Info:
Charles Darwin -
Charles Darwin is the celebrated author of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. His work was first published on November 24, 1859 by John Murray, London, England, and it is widely considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology.
