 Virginia reader Myke Myers kindly
brought to my attention the work of his fellow Virginian William McDonough.
McDonough is an architect and designer who has garnered a lot of press
for his bold yet pragmatic view of design. In a recent interview with
New Scientist he says:
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 more than 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...
The Earth's natural systems can probably support a few hundred million
of our species, but soon there could be 10 billion of us...
Eco-efficiency, where you try to reduce everything to zero, is not much
fun. And nature itself is not that efficient. It's effective. Take a
cherry tree in the spring. It's not efficient - how many blossoms does
it need to regenerate? But it is effective: it makes cherries. We
celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency, but for its
effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow,
and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then
they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem.
We can celebrate abundance where it is ecologically intelligent. From
my designer's perspective, I ask: why can't I design a building like a
tree? A building that makes oxygen, fixes nitrogen, sequesters carbon,
distils water, builds soil, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex
sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colours with the
seasons and self-replicates. This is using nature as a model and a
mentor, not an inconvenience. It's a delightful prospect.
When I'm working with business people I talk business. We talk about
how much money can be made or saved, because that gets their attention.
We never try to convert someone who is calcified: we never try to teach
mules to play the violin. It sounds terrible and the mules don't like
it.
McDonough maintains four websites: His firm's, his partnership's, his own, and his intelligent design
site. The sites are as effectively designed as his buildings -- easy to
browse, productive, engaging, and advancing the cause (the media are
invited to select from ready-to-plagiarize materials that simplify
writing about McDonough or his businesses). He's won awards as a
visionary and environmentalist, and his firm's designs have won awards
for eco-efficiency. And he's written a book, Cradle to Cradle
(itself made of recyclable polypropylene, not paper), with colleague
Michael Braungart, that explains the vision that underlies all his
work. It is, simply: Learn from, and imitate, nature -- nature knows how to design and build things right, everything recycled, zero waste.
This is the kind of thinking we need -- assuming we can
somehow solve the fact that there are at least ten times as many people
on the planet as it can healthily support, and that our culture, and
its political, legal and economic systems are utterly dependent on an
unsustainable concentration of wealth, abuse of power,
ever-accelerating growth in consumption of resources, and subjugation
of human will and dignity.
McDonough calls himself an optimist, and thinks we can turn everything
around by just redesigning our world. But I think sooner or later in
this century, whether we solve the population and culture problems
quickly and intelligently, or go crashing into the wall of
eco-catastrophe, we are going to need to radically redesign and rebuild
our culture, our economy, and our social systems. We can only hope that
with guidance from people like William McDonough -- and also listening
to nature and our own instincts -- we will design and build the next
human culture more responsibly and intelligently than we did the
current one. So that those of us lucky enough to live in that brave new
world will know only balance, beauty, harmony, abundance and peace.
Just as our ancestors lived for three million years before we invented
civilization, and just as every other species on our world has always
done. Imagine.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
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