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January 21 - February 1, 2019
The scientific community is usually paid to study problems, not solutions; indeed, finding a solution to the problem under study usually brings an end to funding for research.
“Eliminate the concept of waste”—not reduce, minimize, or avoid waste, as environmentalists were then propounding, but eliminate the very concept, by design.
Consider this: all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do.
But there were fundamental flaws in the Industrial Revolution’s design. They resulted in some crucial omissions, and devastating consequences have been handed down to us, along with the dominant assumptions of the era in which the transformation took shape.
Cradle-to-grave designs dominate modern manufacturing. According to some accounts more than 90 percent of materials extracted to make durable goods in the United States become waste almost immediately.
Also, what most people see in their garbage cans is just the tip of a material iceberg; the product itself contains on average only 5 percent of the raw materials involved in the process of making and delivering it.
To achieve their universal design solutions, manufacturers design for a worst-case scenario; they design a product for the worst possible circumstance, so that it will always operate with the same efficacy.
If the first Industrial Revolution had a motto, we like to joke, it would be “If brute force doesn’t work, you’re not using enough of it.”
Under the existing paradigm of manufacturing and development, diversity—an integral element of the natural world—is typically treated as a hostile force and a threat to design goals. Brute force and universal design approaches to typical development tend to overwhelm (and ignore) natural and cultural diversity, resulting in less variety and greater homogeneity.
The waste, pollution, crude products, and other negative effects that we have described are not the result of corporations doing something morally wrong. They are the consequence of outdated and unintelligent design.
“Recycling is an aspirin, alleviating a rather large collective hangover . . . overconsumption.” Or again, “The best way to reduce any environmental impact is not to recycle more, but to produce and dispose of less.”
What about recycling? As we have noted, most recycling is actually downcycling; it reduces the quality of a material over time. When plastics other than those found in soda and water bottles are recycled, they are mixed with different plastics to produce a hybrid of lower quality, which is then molded into something amorphous and cheap, such as a park bench or a speed bump.
Just because a material is recycled does not automatically make it ecologically benign, especially if it was not designed specifically for recycling. Blindly adopting superficial environmental approaches without fully understanding their effects can be no better—and perhaps even worse—than doing nothing.
In Systems of Survival the urbanist and economic thinker Jane Jacobs describes two fundamental syndromes of human civilizations: what she calls the guardian and commerce. The guardian is the government, the agency whose primary purpose is to preserve and protect the public. This syndrome is slow and serious. It reserves the right to kill—that is, it will go to war. It represents the public interest, and it is meant to shun commerce (witness conflicts over capital campaign contributions from vested interests).
Jacobs sees other problems with “monstrous hybrids.” Regulations force companies to comply under threat of punishment, but they seldom reward commerce for taking initiatives.
But ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure. In fact, it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an “acceptable” rate.
The “be less bad” environmental approaches to industry have been crucial in sending important messages of environmental concern—messages that continue to catch the public’s attention and to spur important research. At the same time, they forward conclusions that are less useful. Instead of presenting an inspiring and exciting vision of change, conventional environmental approaches focus on what not to do. Such proscriptions can be seen as a kind of guilt management for our collective sins, a familiar placebo in Western culture.
But unquestionably there are things we all want to grow, and things we don’t want to grow. We wish to grow education and not ignorance, health and not sickness, prosperity and not destitution, clean water and not poisoned water. We wish to improve the quality of life. The key is not to make human industries and systems smaller, as efficiency advocates propound, but to design them to get bigger and better in a way that replenishes, restores, and nourishes the rest of the world. Thus the “right things” for manufacturers and industrialists to do are those that lead to good growth—more niches,
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The forbidden fruit tree is a useful metaphor for a culture of control, for the barriers erected and maintained—whether physical or ideological—between nature and human industry. Sweeping away, shutting out, and controlling nature’s
This cyclical, cradle-to-cradle biological system has nourished a planet of thriving, diverse abundance for millions of years. Until very recently in the Earth’s history, it was the only system, and every living thing on the planet belonged to it. Growth was good. It meant more trees, more species, greater diversity, and more complex, resilient ecosystems.
To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things—products, packaging, and systems—from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.
(Note the paradoxes here: the trimmings of a fabric are not to be buried or disposed of without expensive precaution, or must be exported “safely” to another location, but the material itself can still be sold as safe for installation in an office or home.)
Instead of filtering out mutagens, carcinogens, endocrine disrupters, persistent toxins, and bioaccumulative substances at the end of the process, we would filter them out at the beginning. In fact, we would go beyond designing a fabric that would do no harm; we would design one that was nutritious.
Some materials do not fit into either the organic or technical metabolism because they contain materials that are hazardous. We call them unmarketables, and until technological ways of detoxifying them—or doing without them—have been developed, they also require creative measures.
Should manufacturers of existing products feel guilty about their complicity in this heretofore destructive agenda? Yes. No. It doesn’t matter. Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome. Negligence is described as doing the same thing over and over even though you know it is dangerous, stupid, or wrong. Now that we know, it’s time for a change. Negligence starts tomorrow.
The current design response of humans to this framework might be called “attack of the one-size-fits-all.” Layers of concrete and asphalt obliterate forests, deserts, coastal marshes, jungles—everything in their path.
We see this as de-evolution—simplification on a mass scale—and it is not limited to ecology. For centuries, our species has built up a variety of cultures across the globe, ways of eating, speaking, dressing, worshiping, expressing, creating.
First, it means that in the course of our individual activities, we work toward a rich connection with place, and not simply with surrounding ecosystems; biodiversity is only one aspect of diversity. Industries that respect diversity engage with local material and energy flows, and with local social, cultural, and economic forces, instead of viewing themselves as autonomous entities, unconnected to the culture or landscape around them.
As we wrote in The Hannover Principles, “Recognize interdependence. The elements of human design are entwined with and depend upon the natural world, with broad and diverse implications at every scale. Expand design considerations and recognize distant effects.”
With new technologies and brute force energy supplies (such as fossil fuels), the Industrial Revolution gave humans unprecedented power over nature. No longer were people so dependent on natural forces, or so helpless against the vicissitudes of land and sea. They could override nature to accomplish their goals as never before.
When Bill gives talks to architects, he asks who knows how to find true south—not magnetic or “map” south but true solar south—and gets few or no hands (and, stranger still, no requests to learn how).
Our questioners often believe that the interests of commerce and the environment are inherently in conflict, and that environmentalists who work with big businesses have sold out.
Herman Daly.
We tell our commercial clients that if the answer is no, don’t do it. As we see it, the role of commerce is to stay in business as it transforms.
We move over to the Economy/Equity sector, where we must consider questions of money and fairness; for instance, Are employees earning a living wage? (Here, again, sustainability is local: A living wage is going to be different wherever you live. From our perspective, it would be whatever it takes to raise a family.)
The conventional design criteria are a tripod: cost, aesthetics, and performance. Can we profit from it? the company asks.
The first step was to create a “Rouge Room” in the basement of the company’s headquarters, where the design team—which included representatives of all sectors of the company, along with outsiders like chemists, toxicologists, biologists, regulatory specialists, and union representatives—could come together.
Bear in mind that positively selecting the ingredients of which a product is made, and how they are combined, is the goal.
Push the design assignment further: “Design a new transportation infrastructure.” In other words, don’t just reinvent the recipe, rethink the menu.
We ask: What is the customer’s need, how is the culture evolving, and how can these purposes be met by appealing and different kinds of products or services?
Exert intergenerational responsibility. In 1789 Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison in which he argued that a federal bond should be repaid within one generation of the debt, because, as he put it, “The earth belongs . . . to the living . . . No man can by natural right oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeeded him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living.”
