All “Stuff” Is Not Equal, Part II

(1) The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, by Paul Hawken (NY: HarperBusiness, 1993)

(2) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart (NY: North Point Press, 2002)

If you only want to read one of these books and want an exciting, fun approach and don’t have the patience for a lot of depressing detail supporting the argument for necessity (and who would pick up these books if not already convinced of the necessity for change?), I recommend McDonough & Braungart’s 2002 contribution. Cradle to Cradle is only 186 pages, its tone is very upbeat, and the physical book itself is an example of what the authors are talking about. In their “tale of three books,” they first compare a traditionally printed and bound book with one using soy ink on recycled paper. The first is handsome, a pleasure to hold and easy to read, while the second is flimsy and hard on the eyes. But why should these be our only choices? Let’s rethink the design, say the authors, and here is a description of book that breaks out of the false dilemma:

The pages are white and have a sensuous smoothness, and unlike recycled paper, they do not yellow with age. The ink won’t rub off on the reader’s fingers. Although its next life has already been imagined [the materials are fully recyclable], this book is durable enough to last for many generations. It’s even waterproof, so you can read it at the beach, even in the hot tub. It celebrates its materials rather than apologizing for them. Books become books become books over and over again, each incarnation a sparkling new vehicle for fresh images and ideas. Form follows not just function but the evolution of the medium itself, in the endlessly propagating spirit of the printed word.

Holding an example of good design in your hands while reading about good design makes the idea come alive.

Cradle to Cradle came out eight years ago, before the popularity of e-readers, and for some the new technology may seem a better solution. I wonder. I wonder not just because I sell books but because I love them (which is why I sell them). I also wonder about e-books because a future that doesn’t allow me permanent ownership of what I’ve “bought” (rented, really) seems like a future without books, and that scares me. What if the book I want becomes unavailable? There’s no way I can insure being able to read it again! Another reason? The real, physical book I choose now, to keep and love for the rest of my life, requires no batteries and (unlike the laptop I'm composing this post on) will generate no e-waste, so even with traditionally printed and bound books, I feel pretty good about what it is I sell, and I don’t see how I could possibly have the same good feelings about having my own business if I were selling electronic gadgets or cheap, imported, battery-operated plastic toys.

I said that Cradle to Cradle has an upbeat tone. I would love to see this book as required reading for high school seniors across the country, because it doesn’t send a message to young people that the “good old days” are over and that their future, because they were born too late, will have to be lived in dark caves. The inspiring, exciting, uplifting and spirit-freeing feeling this book imparts comes precisely from the fact that its authors have taken the big environmental questions and problems out of the field of ethics and framed them as design problems.

The old Industrial Revolution designed products with assumptions we now know to be false: that natural resources are in “endless” supply, that Nature can always restore itself, etc. Products were designed to last from “cradle” (the resource pile) to “grave” (the waste pile). Now that we see so clearly that our natural resource capital pile is shrinking and the waste pile growing, we cannot afford to continue designing on false assumptions. Designing for the life of the materials, assuring that everything used can be returned to the resource pile for future use, is designing from cradle to cradle, and the authors offer a challenge to creativity rather than a scolding.

Environmental ethics all too often boils down to using less and recycling. (Hawken put the recycling argument bluntly: “If the items used in households in America were all recycled, this would reduce our solid waste by only 1 or 2%.”) But recycling, buying less, using less—none of that alone changes the overall, linear, cradle-to-grave paradigm. (You might think of it like vowing not to tell lies seven days a week but cutting back to three or four.) And for every virtuous ecological decision I hold up over my neighbor, my neighbor can show some other way I am at fault and he isn’t, so the finger-pointing becomes tedious, and people end up sticking their fingers in their ears.

McDonough and Braungart are clear early in their book about the way they don’t want to approach the problem:

The environmental message ... can be strident and depressing: Stop being so bad, so materialistic, so greedy. Do whatever you can, no matter how inconvenient, to limit your “consumption.” Buy less, spend less, drive less, have fewer children—or none.

Bill McDonough writes of his own early work in design: “I was tired of working hard to be less bad.” What he wanted was to do good work.

Don’t we all? And don’t we want our children and grandchildren to have opportunities to do good work? The examples given in this book, from books to carpets to the renting and recycling (rather than purchase and disposal) of solvents, paint a vision of what the future could be, given intelligent design.

“Nature doesn’t have a design problem,” McDonough and Braungart write. “People do.”

Here are some of the important issues on which McDonough & Braungart agree with Hawken:

• Our supply of natural resources is finite but can be replenished given more intelligent production processes.
• Most bad consequences are not intended, and no one wants them. They are a problem for all of us. “In planetary terms, we are all downstream” (M&B).
• “Less bad” is not good and not nearly good enough.
• It is the nature of business and commerce to be creative.
• Production must shift from a linear process to a cyclical process.
• There is no universal, one-size-fits-all solution to any design problem. Good designs depend on specific location and use local materials wherever possible.
• Human beings have the ability to design processes that mimic nature, producing “stuff” that will not end up as waste.
• This is an exciting challenge!

They differ on at least two major points:

• Hawken sees overpopulation as a problem and takes the idea of “carrying capacity” seriously. McDonough & Braungart consider this gloomy and negative thinking, and they don’t buy it. They seem to think that good design will overcome natural limits. An indication of the distance between the two books on this point is B&M’s dismissal of sustainability as an unexciting goal. B&M want a lot more fun out of life than that.
• Where Hawken would have society, wortld-wide, design systems of fees and taxes to motivate internalization of all costs, McDonough & Braungart see any regulation at all as a signal of design failure, the issuing of a “license to harm.” Hawken agrees that existing attempts at fining polluters has amounted to “licensing to harm” but believes that is because the fines did not fully reflect costs. If all costs were accounted for, companies would be financially motivated to work toward better and better designs. B&M are confident that because we can build self-regulating systems, we will do it--without stick or carrot. Or rather, the carrot will be our own pride in accomplishment.

Both of these books contain bad news and good news. All three authors express more optimism than is usually heard from environmentalists. All three authors (of the two books) are very optimistic and excited about design challenges, and all believe in the creativity of business and commerce. Hawken is not as optimistic about a “limitless” world as McDonough & Braungart, nor does he see the “re-evolution” taking place without financial motivation coming at corporate concerns from the outside.

What do you think? The changes are imaginable, but do we have the will to make the changes?

One problem is that each individual human life is lived only in the short term, and there will always be people content to rob and pillage and destroy to enrich themselves for the short span of their own lives, little caring what happens when they’re gone. A more subtle motivation problem appears in an article in this week’s New York Review of Books, in a review of two books on happiness research. The reviewer is philosopher Thomas Nagel, the subtle problem that people don’t just want stuff, and they aren’t necessarily happy when they have as much stuff as other people. For some people, having more than other people is the whole point. Might there even be people (this would be the “dog in the manger” syndrome) who crave the luxury of wasting what no one else can use?

I don’t have answers to these questions, but they are things I wonder about. Readers determined to be pessimistic will resist even Hawken’s program, while the radically, radiantly sunshiny will go along with McDonough & Braungart all the way. (I tend to think more like Hawken, sustainability is plenty exciting for me, and yet I appreciate B&M's insistence on fun, too.) Whatever your personal inclinations, these are important books. These are important ideas. And both offer a positive vision for the future, challenges to be undertaken in a spirit of exploration and discovery. Isn’t that worth quite a lot?

All “Stuff” Is Not Equal, Part I

Books discussed in this post and post to follow (Part II):

(1) The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability, by Paul Hawken (NY: HarperBusiness, 1993)

(2) Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough & Michael Braungart (NY: North Point Press, 2002)

I’ll ask you to picture an old-fashioned construction site, the kind my friends and I used as playgrounds on summer evenings, a scene dominated by big, exciting piles of dirt to be run up and down, the “king of the mountain” remaining at the summit. See in your mind three such piles. All right, now instead of dirt see them composed of (1) natural resources, (2) “stuff” people have made, and (3) discarded waste.

The earth itself and everything on it and in it constitutes the first pile. Additionally, coming at us every day and adding to that pile, is energy from the sun. A star’s decay is our source of life.

Next the “stuff.” Everything in pile #2 was made from contents of the resource pile, but while the sun keeps coming at us every day, it can’t make oil fast enough to keep up with our use, and precious minerals aren’t formed quickly, either, so in general the resource pile gets smaller as the stuff pile gets bigger. But keep that “in general” in mind, because whether or not the resource pile shrinks depends on how and out of what we make our stuff. The best “stuff” we make and use can be returned to the resource pile for future use.

And before we go on to pile #3, we need to say something about the many ways we take away from the resource pile without adding anything to the stuff pile. Travel is a big category of resource use that doesn’t add to the stuff pile. Yes, trains and cars and planes are all manufactured and count as stuff, but more resources are used up in moving the vehicles and us from place to place. Frequent fliers don’t pile up miles in closets, but flying, like driving, makes heavy demands on the resource pile. By the end of the 20th century, Americans were consuming fuel for travel 40 times faster than they had done in 1900. Follow this link to read about changes in modes of travel through our history, where gains in efficiency were made and how different modes compare to one another. I’ll quote the bottom line here for those who don’t follow the link:

The increased travel (and increased population) in the 20th century not only canceled out the 5-fold gain in fuel efficiency but increased fuel consumption for travel 40 times. Thus, in addition to striving to increase fuel efficiency, it's even more important to strive to reduce the need for travel as well as to reduce population.

Moral of this part of the story: All use does not result in “stuff,” and all “stuff” is not equal.

Now, finally, on to the third pile—and here this whole mental exercise suddenly strikes me as a tour of Dante’s Divine Comedy in reverse, with the resource pile (wonderful gift!) as heaven, the stuff pile (glittering temptations!) purgatory, and the waste pile as pure hell, a horror growing even as we gaze. The waste pile is built up of stuff that was used and discarded, along with (perhaps an even greater portion of the pile) unwanted byproducts of the making of stuff. Some waste could be recycled and returned to the resource pile but hasn’t been. Other parts, tragically, are not recyclable at all and can never again in our lifetimes become resources.

Now, the Big Question (BQ): Is there any way to halt the ongoing depletion of the resource pile and to stop the waste pile from growing and still enjoy stuff? Put another way: Is the only way to achieve these goals to stop making and buying stuff? And does that mean that people already lucky enough to have plenty of stuff just kick away the ladder and tell the rest of the world to do without for the sake of the planet? This is the question of two books I want to highlight in today’s post and the one to follow. These books answer, basically, as follows: The problem with how we have been making things since the Industrial Revolution is a design problem. We need new designs. We need to design products for the life of their component materials, recognizing that (as my friend on Throwaway Blog says) “nothing ever really goes away, does it?”

McDonough and Braungart are in agreement with Hawken on many important points, and I’ll focus on those in this post, discussing mostly Hawken’s book. In Part II, spending more time on McDonough and Braungart, I’ll also highlight their differences from the Hawken view.

We Americans pay a smaller percentage of our income for food than people in other countries. We pay less for gasoline than any Western European country. As a nation we flock to big box stores to buy television sets produced overseas. But we get all this stuff “cheap” because—like maxing out credit cards or taking Incompletes rather than getting term papers written on time—we’re postponing true accounting, and future generations (not far down the line) will be handed the bill.

Markets are the place at which production becomes consumption, but at present they do not recognize the destruction and waste caused by that production. Because markets are a price-based system, they naturally favor traders who come to market with the lowest price, which often means the highest unrecognized costs.

Hawken gives cigarette smoking as an example, with lost wages and high health care costs not included in the price of the pack (though how anyone can still be smoking cigarettes when a single pack costs between $5 and $8 is completely beyond me) and goes on to say that

...this is true for almost all production/consumption systems, whether they involve the steel in your car, the wood in your house, or the food on your table. The problem is that these costs are shared unevenly, just as the profits from selling them are garnered disproportionately.

As a species, we human beings (unlike any other life form on earth) are spending the earth’s capital, eating our own and other species’ seed corn—use whatever metaphor makes it most vivid to you. Between the resource pile and the stuff pile, as we all know, comes transformation and reorganization of materials, but unfortunately most of what we transform ends up in the waste pile. Designing for the life of materials rather than for product life would create cycles of recovery and reuse in place of a dead end mountain.

Toxic waste is the worst, but disposal of toxic waste, as Hawken sees it, is not the root problem. Rather, it is the root symptom. “The critical issue is the creation of toxic wastes.” And that’s what we need to stop.

In the natural world, all processes, directly or indirectly, result in food for other species. Rot, rust, ants, worms, skunks, toads, pikas, voles, bats, moles, mites, alder, gentian, lichens and several thousand other plants, invertebraves, birds, reptiles and mammals make up a forest. ... In the forest, there is a competitive yet yielding relation....

The most sustainable agricultural practices mimic nature, returning “waste” (there is no true waste in nature) to the soil, whereas the least sustainable methods require heavy financial debt, reduce biodiversity and speed soil erosion. Other writers I’ve written on recently pointed to the industrial ideal of “efficiency” as a distraction from what really goes on in farming, and Hawken is in complete agreement:

What we call “efficient” in agriculture is usually a process that substitutes fossil fuel in its myriad forms for human labor, displacing workers and families while causing widespread and lasting ecological damage to soil, water and wildlife. ...The most truly efficient farm is the one that most effectively internalizes all of its costs. This is a farm that builds up topsoil, that uses water sparingly and thriftily, that uses pesticides rarely if at all, that understands that the secret to healthy plants is healthy soil, not deadly chemicals.

If price were reflective of all costs, Hawken says, you would not pay more for locally grown, organic produce than you pay now for chemically grown fruits and vegetables transported hundreds or thousands of miles. Set that “If” to one side for a minute. We will come back to it shortly.

Again, a BQ: Must an economy involve limitless growth, or can it be healthy without expansion? Classical economists answer the question one way, Hawken differently, by means of a distinction borrowed from Herman Daly, who puts it like this: “A growing economy is getting bigger; a developing economy is getting better.” Hawken describes the developing, or restorative, economy in this way:

Growing implies size for the sake of size, while the idea of development implies that the product or service supplied will actually help people use fewer resources in the long run, and at the same time will serve or improve their lives. In the restorative economy, a company is based on the idea that its products or services will improve people’s lives qualitatively, not quantitatively. It should provide a product or service that helps people develop their lives, and not merely increase the amount of their possessions. The smaller the business, the easier it is to internalize this distinction.

Two huge issues lurk here. One is jobs, the other motivation. Internalization of all costs in the production process, Hawken argues, would recreate jobs and put people back to work. Sounds good. Sounds great! But—and here we come back to that earlier “If”--what would bring about such a revolutionary change in our economy? What would motivate manufacturers to internalize all costs, to hire more workers, to redesign commerce so drastically that it would be paying its way in the world?

Hawken’s answer begins by noting that design is not limited to products. Systems and ways of doing things can also be designed. So prior to redesigning products we would design systems that would encourage new and better products to emerge. Motivation would come in the form of green taxes or green fees. More resources might be managed as public utilities. The whole idea is to design a marketplace that makes destruction of resources and creation of waste very expensive and that rewards ecologically restorative acts. From this would come “environmental restoration, economic prosperity, job creation, and social stability.”

End of Part I