Cradle to Cradle Read online

  This is nature’s design framework: a flowering of diversity, a flowering of abundance. It is Earth’s response to its one source of incoming energy: the sun.

  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. Buildings that present a bland, uniform front rise in communities where structures were for decades, even centuries, beautiful and culturally distinct. Spaces once lush with foliage and wildlife shrink to marginal places where only the hardiest species—crows, roaches, mice, pigeons, squirrels—survive. Landscapes are flattened into lawns of a single species of grass, artificially encouraged to grow but constantly cut back, with controlled hedges and a few severely pruned trees. The monotony spreads and spreads, overwhelming the details of place in its path. What it seems to seek is simply more of itself.

  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. A tide of sameness is spreading from sea to sea, sweeping away these cultural details too.

  Against this tide of sameness we advance the principle “respect diversity.” By this we mean to include not only biodiversity but also diversity of place and of culture, of desire and need, the uniquely human element. How can a factory built in a desert climate be delightfully different from one constructed in the tropics? What does it mean to be Balinese, to be Mexican, and to express it? How can we enrich local species, and invite them into our “cultivated” landscapes instead of destroying or chasing them away? How can we gain profit and pleasure from a diversity of natural energy flows? How can we engage with an abundance of diverse materials, options, and responses, of creative and elegant solutions?

  The Fittest Survive, the Fitting-est Thrive

  Popular wisdom holds that the fittest survive, the strongest, leanest, largest, perhaps meanest—whatever beats the competition. But in healthy, thriving natural systems it is actually the fitting-est who thrive. Fitting-est implies an energetic and material engagement with place, and an interdependent relationship to it.

  Think again of the ants. We may have an archetypal notion of “ant,” but in fact there are more than eight thousand different kinds of ants that inhabit the planet. Over millions of years, each has evolved to fit its particular locale, developing features and behaviors that enable it to carve out a habitat and to cull the energy and nourishment it needs. In the rain forest, hundreds of different species of ants may coexist in the crown of a single large tree. There is the leaf-cutter ant, with mandibles designed to cut and carry foliage; the fire ant, a scavenger with advanced methods of group transport to tote prey of various sizes to its nest; the weaver ant, with its advanced pheromone communication system used to call allies and workers to war; the trap-jaw ant, whose ferocious snapping jaw is legendary. Around the world there are ants that hunt alone, ants that hunt in groups, and ants that raise broods of aphid “cattle,” which they milk for sweet liquid. In a startling use of solar power, hundreds of one colony’s workers may cluster on the forest floor to soak up sunlight before carrying its warmth in their very bodies back down to the nest.

  Being fitting, ants do not inevitably work to destroy competing species. Rather, they compete productively from their niches, the term scientists use to describe species’ various zones of habitation and resource use within an ecosystem. In his book Diversity and the Rain Forest, John Terborgh, a scientist who has studied the complex ecosystems of the rain forest, explains how ten species of ant wren manage to cohabit a single area of the forest while preying on the same kinds of insects: one species inhabits an area close to the ground, several more live in the middle tiers of the trees, and another occupies the high canopy. In each of these areas, species forage differently—one middle-tier wren gleans the leaves for insects, another the twigs and branches, and so forth, leaving food in the other niches.

  The vitality of ecosystems depends on relationships: what goes on between species, their uses and exchanges of materials and energy in a given place. A tapestry is the metaphor often invoked to describe diversity, a richly textured web of individual species woven together with interlocking tasks. In such a setting, diversity means strength, and monoculture means weakness. Remove the threads, one by one, and an ecosystem becomes less stable, less able to withstand natural catastrophe and disease, less able to stay healthy and to evolve over time. The more diversity there is, the more productive functions—for the ecosystem, for the planet—are performed.

  Each inhabitant of an ecosystem is therefore interdependent to some extent with the others. Every creature is involved in maintaining the entire system; all of them work in creative and ultimately effective ways for the success of the whole. The leaf-cutter ants, for example, recycle nutrients, taking them to deeper soil layers so that plants, worms, and microorganisms can process them, all in the course of gathering and storing food for themselves. Ants everywhere loosen and aerate the soil around plant roots, helping to make it permeable to water. Trees transpire and purify water, make oxygen, and cool the planet’s surface. Each species’ industry has not only individual and local implications but global ones as well. (In fact, some people, such as those who subscribe to the Gaia principle, go so far as to perceive the world as a single giant organism.)

  If nature is our model, what does it mean for human industries to be involved in maintaining and enriching this vibrant tapestry? 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.

  All Sustainability Is Local

  We begin to make human systems and industries fitting when we recognize that all sustainability (just like all politics) is local. We connect them to local material and energy flows, and to local customs, needs, and tastes, from the level of the molecule to the level of the region itself. We consider how the chemicals we use affect local water and soil—rather than contaminate, how might they nourish?—what the product is made from, the surroundings in which it is made, how our processes interact with what is happening upstream and downstream, how we can create meaningful occupations, enhance the region’s economic and physical health, accrue biological and technical wealth for the future. If we import a material from a distant place, we honor what happened there as a local event. 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.”

  When Bill traveled to Jordan with his professor in 1973 to work on a long-term plan for the future of the East Bank of the Jordan River Valley, the team’s design assignment was to identify strategies for building towns of the future in which the Bedouin could settle, now that political borders had put a stop to their traditional nomadic migrations. A competing team proposed Soviet-style prefabricated housing blocks of a sort that became ubiquitous in the former Eastern Bloc and USSR, “anywhere” buildings that can be found from Siberia to the Caspian Desert. The buildings themselves would be trucked down rough roads from an industrial center in the highlands near Amman and assembled in the valley.

  Bill and his colleagues created a proposal to adapt and encourage adobe structures. Local people could build these with materials at hand—clay and straw, horse, camel, or goat hair, and (not least) abundant sun. The materials were ancient, well understood, and uniquely suited to the hot, dry climate. The structures themselves were designed to optimize temperature flux over the co
urse of the day and year: at night their mass absorbed and stored the coolness of the air, which would keep the interior temperature down during the hot desert days. The team tracked down elder craftspeople in the region who could show them how to build the structures (especially the domes) and then train the Bedouin youths (who had grown up with tents) to build with and repair adobe in the future.

  The question that helped to guide the team’s work at every level was: What is the right thing for this place? Not prefabricated elements, or mastery of the landscape with a universal modern style, they concluded. They hoped their plan would enhance that particular community in several ways: the homes were built from local materials that were biologically and technically reusable. Employing these materials and the services of nearby craftsmen would generate local economic activity and support as many residents as possible. It would involve local people in building the community and keep them connected to the region’s cultural heritage, which the structures’ aesthetic distinctiveness itself helped to perpetuate. Enlisting local craftsmen to train young people in the use of local materials and techniques would encourage an intergenerational connection.

  Using Local Materials

  The idea of local sustainability is not limited to materials, but it begins with them. Using local materials opens the doors to profitable local enterprise. It also avoids the problem of bioinvasion, when transfer of materials from one region to another inadvertently introduces invasive nonnative species to fragile ecosystems. Chestnut blight, responsible for wiping out chestnut trees in the United States, entered this country on a piece of lumber from China. Chestnuts were a dominant tree of the eastern forests. The other native species evolved together with them, and now they are gone.

  We consider not only physical materials but physical processes and their effect on the surrounding environment. Instead of destroying a landscape with conventional hack-and-mow practices, we imagine how to invite more local species in (as we did with the Herman Miller factory). By seeing sustainability as both a local and a global event, we can understand that just as it is not viable to poison local water and air with waste, it is equally unacceptable to send it downstream, or to ship it overseas to other, less regulated shores.

  Perhaps the ultimate example of effective use of local materials lies in processing what we know as human waste—a fundamental application also of the principle “waste equals food.” We have been working on the creation of sewage treatment plants based on bioremediation (the breaking down and purifying of wastes by nature), to replace the conventional harsh chemical treatment of sewage. Biologist John Todd calls these systems “living machines,” because they use living organisms—plants, algae, fish, shrimp, microbes, and so on—instead of toxins like chlorine to purify water. These living machines are often associated with artificial environments created in greenhouses, but they have taken all kinds of forms. Some of the systems we are currently integrating into our projects are designed to work outside and year-round, in all kinds of climates. Others are constructed wetlands, or even reed beds floating on a toxic lagoon, outfitted with little windmills to move the sludge through.

  For developing countries, this approach to sewage treatment represents a huge opportunity to maximize nutrient flows and implement a nutritious agenda right away. As the tropics rapidly develop, populations are expanding, and the pressure to clean up effluents (and the bodies of water in which they are routinely disposed) increases. Instead of adopting a one-size-fits-all design solution that is highly ineffective in the long run, we are encouraging these diverse cultures to develop new sewage treatment systems that make waste equal food. In 1992 a model waste treatment system developed by Michael and his colleagues was opened at Silva Jardin, in the province of Rio, Brazil. It was locally fabricated using clay pipes that carried wastewater from village residents to a large settling tank, then into an intricately connected series of small ponds full of an astonishing diversity of plants, microbes, snails, fish, and shrimp. The system was designed to recover nutrients along the way, producing clean, safe drinking water as a by-product. Farmers competed for access to this purified water and to the sludge’s valuable nitrogen, phosphorus, and trace materials as nutrients for farming. Instead of being a liability, the sewage was from the outset perceived and treated as an asset of great value.

  A community we are working with in Indiana simply stores its septage (the solids from sewage) in underground tanks during the chilly winters. In the summer, when the sun shines long and bright, the septage is moved to a large outdoor garden and constructed wetland, where plants, microbes, fungi, snails, and other organisms purify and use its nutrients with the power of the sun. This system is locally relevant in several ways. It works with the seasons, optimizing solar power when it is available, instead of forcing treatment during the winter when solar heat is scarce. It uses native nutrients and plants for a process that returns quality drinking water to the aquifer and sustains a lovely garden. The community ends up with millions of sewage treatment “plants”—a living example of biodiversity.

  A further point: in this case, there was only one logical site for sewage treatment, on the edge of the community next to a major highway—which happens to be upstream. Because they have kept the effects of their sewage local, residents think twice about pouring a dangerous substance down the sink, or about mixing technical and biological materials. It renders palpable to them that their effluents do matter, not in some abstract way, but to real people and their families. But even if we had been able to situate the sewage site “away,” we would have done well to act as if it were right where it is. In planetary terms, we’re all downstream.

  Connecting to Natural Energy Flows

  In the 1830s Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled to Europe on a sailboat and returned on a steamship. If we look at this moment symbolically, we could say he went over on a recyclable vessel that was solar-powered, operated by craftsmen practicing ancient arts in the open air. He returned in what would become a steel rust bucket spewing oil on the water and smoke in the sky, operated by men shoveling fossil fuels into the mouths of boilers in the dark. In his journals on the way back in the steamship, Emerson noted the lack of what he wistfully described as the connection to the “Aeolian kinetic”—the force of the wind. He wondered at the implications of these changing connections between humans and nature.

  Some of those implications might well have dismayed him. 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. But in the process, a massive disconnection has taken place. Modern homes, buildings, and factories, even whole cities, are so closed off from natural energy flows that they are virtual steamships. It was Le Corbusier who said the house was a machine for living in, and he glorified steamships, along with airplanes, cars, and grain elevators. In point of fact, the buildings he designed had cross-ventilation and other people-friendly elements, but as his message was taken up by the modern movement, it evolved into a machinelike sameness of design. Glass, the heroic material that could connect indoors and outdoors, was used as a way of cutting us off from nature. While the sun shone, people toiled under fluorescent lights, literally working in the dark. Our structures might be machines for living in, but there was no longer much about them that was alive. (A 1998 Wall Street Journal article about our buildings’ novel feature of having windows that open—that being a hot new commodity—reflected a true low point in the annals of contemporary commercial architecture.)

  What a far cry from the saltbox houses of colonial New England, constructed with a high south side where the house’s precious windows were mostly clustered, to maximize exposure to the winter sun. (In summer, the leaves of a large maple to the southwest provided shelter from the sun.) A central fireplace and chimney mass provided a warm hea
rth at the heart of the home, and the low north roof huddled the heated mass away from cold behind a windrow of evergreen trees planted and maintained expressly for the purpose. The structure and the surrounding landscape worked together as a total design.

  It is easy to forget, in the gas-powered glare of a postindustrial age, that not only local materials and customs but energy flows have provenance. In less industrialized parts of the world, however, creative approaches to capturing local energy flows are still very much alive. The aboriginal people on the coast of Australia have a simple, elegant strategy for harnessing sunlight: two forked sticks with a single pole across the top make a beam against which bark is laid and overlapped like roof tiles on the south side during cooler months, so the inhabitants can sit in the warm north sun. In summer, they move the bark to the north side to block the sun and sit on the other side, in the shade. Their entire “building” consists of a few sticks and bark ingeniously adapted to local circumstance.

  Wind towers have been used for thousands of years in hot climates to capture airflows and draw them through dwellings. In Pakistan, chimneys topped with “wind scoops” literally scoop wind and channel it down the chimney, where there might be a small pool of water for cooling the wind as it moves downward and into the house. Iranian wind towers consist of a ventilated structure that constantly drips water; air comes in, flows down the chimney with its dripping sides, and enters the house, cooled. At Fatepur Sikri in India, porous sandstone screens, sometimes intricately carved, were saturated with water to cool air passing through. In the Loess Plains of China, people dig their homes in the ground to secure shelter from wind and sun.

  But with modern industrialization and its products, such as large sheets of window glass, and the widespread adoption of fossil fuels for cheap and easy heating and cooling, such local ingenuity has faded from industrialized areas, and even in rural regions it is in decline. Oddly enough, professional architects seem to get by without understanding the basic principles that inspired ancient building and architecture orientations. 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).