Cradle to Cradle Ideas

In his innovative and progressive book Cradle to Cradle William McDonough proposes a new way of thinking about solutions for the environmental issues that we face today, especially those that are centered around the materials economy. While he sets forth a lot of interesting ideas in his book, there are several that form the backbone of the argument:

Less Bad is Not Necessarily Good

He also frames this idea by comparing the eco-efficiency (what we strive for in our current system) and eco-effectiveness (what we should be striving for). Essentially, eco-efficiency is simply making less of a bad impact, reducing all the horrible things we already do to the earth. While this is better than the status-quo, it still cannot sustain our earth. What eco-effectiveness suggests is that instead of simply cutting down on our bad impact we work on making our impact a good one. Then, instead of working towards decreasing are "footprint" we could have a huge positive footprint.

Think Like a Cherry Tree

One way to work towards being eco-efficient is to think like a cherry tree. This means, thinking like nature, which means thinking in cycles. In nature, things use the resources they are given in the best way possible. Every resource is used to it's fullest, so nothing is wasted. In other words...

Waste Equals Food

Any seeming waste in the system is actually cycled back into the system for reuse. With a cherry tree, the dropped blossoms decompose and fill the soil with nutrients to help the tree grow next year. In an industrial system, this would require systems that use their waste to fuel other parts of the system. Products that can be completely reused as materials back into the system, instead of thrown out or "downcycled."

Needing a New Design Challenge

In the end, McDonough suggests that we need a new design challenge for reevaluating our industrial system, one with better goals than simply cutting down on the harm we're already doing. These goals, while certainly lofty, are definitely headed in the right direction. As we've talked about in previous classes, little efforts are not going to be enough. We need to stop working on just making our impact less bad and actually have a major re-haul of our system. It may not work out as well as we would hope, but if nothing else it will get us thinking about solutions differently.