Just Enough
should be required reading for anyone who wants to help make today’s world more
sustainable.
Read it, please.
—Sarah Susanka, author
of The Not
So Big House
You are invited to a presentation, booksigning and reception with Tokyo-based New Orleans native architect Azby Brown featuring his new book JUST ENOUGH: Lessons in Living Green from Traditional
Japan.
By sharing personal observation and stories that depict
vanished ways of life, Just Enough offers
insight into what living in a sustainable society is like and how larger
concerns can guide daily decisions. The
book addresses environmentally related problems that people who lived during
the Edo period faced -- from food cultivation
to waste systems to the water supply – and how they went about finding
solutions.
Some two-hundred years ago, the Japanese confronted the same
issues that society faces now – energy, water, materials, food and
population. The way they found to
resolve these issues was to take “just enough” from the world will lead to
living meaningful, satisfying lives.
“People were educated to be conscious of everything they
used, and to place a high value on food, energy, and materials,” says Azby
Brown. “The Japanese of the Edo period
developed highly integrated systems for food production, material procurement,
water supply, and energy provision which were modeled in most cases on natural
processes and meshed well with the natural environment.”
More than anything else, Just
Enough is about a mentality that pervaded traditional Japanese society and
which can serve as a blueprint for geener living today.
Azby Brown, a
native of New Orleans,
is the director of the KIT Future Design Institute in Tokyo. He studied architecture and sculpture at Yale
College, graduating in 1980, then
entered the Department of Architecture of the University of Tokyo
in 1985 under a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education. Brown became an associate professor of
architectural design at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology in 1995, and
currently holds a position there in the department of Media Informatics. He
received his master’s degree in 1988 and completed his PhD research in
1995. He is the author of The Genius of Japanese Carpentry,
Small Spaces, and The Very Small Home.
