Revolution is never easy

[openspace4life]

The book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, starts off as one of those "everything you know is wrong" attacks on an existing prevalent ideology, in this case the one epitomized by the phrase "reduce, reuse, recycle." In the authors' eyes, under the environmental program of increasing "efficiency" so as to reduce our impact on nature, "human beings are regarded as 'bad,' [and] zero is a good goal" (apparently a veiled reference to the ideals of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement). And they deride modern recycling as "downcycling" because the material's quality is reduced, for instance by mixing together all the types of metal, polymer, and paint in a car's body, such that it contains more toxins and can only be recycled once or twice before becoming completely useless.

Of course, this critique is disheartening (recycling being the ritual so many of us have done for decades to appease the eco-gods) and ideologically disturbing (if humans should always be seen as "good," are the authors advocating unlimited population growth?). But it turns out that the book is primarily a description of a few simple steps to "doing it right," following nature's models to redesign our existing products and systems so they can have a positive impact on nature and thus be regarded as "more good" rather than "less bad":

• Waste [from one process] equals food [for another]. This means that products should be designed, not just to be effective at what they do, but to be either completely biodegradable (a biological nutrient) or easily disassembled to recover the materials that went into them, high-quality "technical nutrients" that "are infinitely recyclable at the same level of quality." The corollary is that the simpler the design, the better--for example, we shouldn't have to use a bunch of ingredients whose sole purpose is to counter the negative effects of other ingredients, as is now commonplace in processed foods and other products.
  


• Give equal weight to profitability, benefits to nature, and benefits to society. This might seem too hard for corporate head honchos to swallow, but the authors show examples where this kind of thinking can make a company more competitive than before, for instance by giving factory workers a daylit environment with indoor greenery, which boosts productivity as well as making the workers happier and eliminating some electric lights.
  


• In sum, make sure there is every reason to want more of the product, not less. The authors observe that "The growth of nature (and of children) is usually perceived as beautiful and healthy." They see no reason why economic growth couldn't be viewed the same way, if the products produced are "eco-effective" and actually contribute to the natural and social systems around them.

The authors use ants as an example, because they can be found all over the world and "their biomass exceeds ours," but "They are a good example of a population whose density and productivity are not a problem for the rest of the world, because everything they make and use returns to the cradle-to-cradle cycles of nature." If we can emulate the ants most of the time, and recycle materials that can't be returned instead of trying to bury them, then from an ecological perspective maybe human civilization can be considered "100 percent good." (The social part might be considerably more difficult...)

I was seriously thinking about giving up less than halfway through this book. If I were editing it, I would use the advice of the article "The Death of Environmentalism" and try to make it "an inspiring, positive vision that carried a critique of the current moment within it," rather than a harsh critique followed later by the positive vision. I would have placed more emphasis on the admission that current environmentalist ideas aren't useless, for example that eco-efficiency (i.e. reducing materials and energy use) "is a valuable tool in optimizing the broader eco-effective approach."

When I bought this book, Amazon brightly suggested I get another on that I read parts of a while back: Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins. I'm a short ways in, and I think it will turn out to be a more readable version of the same idea: these authors make it clear from the get-go that they believe the next industrial revolution is already in progress.