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  These are vast improvements on the current paradigm of “car.” It will not end up on a scrap heap. And yet . . . it is still a car. And the current system of more and more cars on widening berths of asphalt is not necessarily ideal for the world of abundance we envision. (Buckminster Fuller used to joke that if extraterrestrial beings came in for a landing on Earth, their impression from ten thousand feet up would probably be that it was inhabited by cars.) Individually, cars can be fun, but terrible traffic jams and a world covered in asphalt are not. And so, having perfected the car as car, as nearly as we can, we move to . . .

  Step 5. Reinvent.

  Now we are doing more than designing for biological and technical cycles. We are recasting the design assignment: not “design a car” but “design a ‘nutrivehicle.’” Instead of aiming to create cars with minimal or zero negative emissions, imagine cars designed to release positive emissions and generate other nutritious effects on the environment. The car’s engine is treated like a chemical plant modeled on natural systems. Everything the car emits is nutritious for nature or industries. As it burns fuel, the water vapor in its emissions could be captured, turned back into water, and made use of. (Currently the average car emits approximately four fifths of a gallon of water vapor into the air for every gallon of gas it burns.) Instead of making the catalytic converter as small as possible, we might develop the means to use nitrous oxide as a fertilizer and configure our car to make and store as much as possible while driving. Instead of releasing the carbon the car produces when burning gasoline as carbon dioxide, why not store it as carbon black in canisters that could be sold to rubber manufacturers? Using fluid mechanics, tires could be designed to attract and capture harmful particles, thus cleaning the air instead of further dirtying it. And, of course, after the end of its useful life, all the car’s materials go back to the biological or technical cycle.

  Push the design assignment further: “Design a new transportation infrastructure.” In other words, don’t just reinvent the recipe, rethink the menu.

  Most transportation infrastructure sprawls and devours valuable natural habitat or land that could be used for housing and agriculture. (The amount of space devoted to roads in Europe is currently equal to the space used for housing, and the two compete with agriculture.) Conventional development also depletes quality of life, with traffic noise, exhaust, and ugliness. A nutrivehicle that doesn’t emit foul exhaust opens the way to a new approach to highways. They could be covered over, providing new green space for housing, agriculture, or recreation. (This might require less effort than it appears to. In many places, roadways are among the little public space still flanked by fields of green.)

  If there are three times as many cars in twenty years as there are today on the planet, of course, it won’t matter very much if they are highly efficient ultralight cars made from advanced carbon fibers and get a hundred miles to a gallon, or are even nutrivehicles. The planet will be crawling with cars, and we will need other options. A more far-ranging assignment? “Design transportation.”

  Sound fanciful? Of course. But remember, the car itself was a fanciful notion in a world of horse and carriage.

  This final step has no absolute end point, and the results may be an entirely different kind of product than the one you began to work on. But it will be an evolution of that product in the sense that it addresses the limitations you became aware of as you moved through the previous steps. Design is based on the attempt to fulfill human needs in an evolving technical and cultural context. We begin by applying the active positive list to existing things, then to things that are only beginning to be imagined, or have not yet been conceived. When we optimize, we open our imaginations to radically new possibilities. We ask: What is the customer’s need, how is the culture evolving, and how can these purposes be met by appealing and different kinds of products or services?

  Five Guiding Principles

  Transformation to an eco-effective vision doesn’t happen all at once, and it requires plenty of trial and error—and time, effort, money, and creativity expended in many directions. Athletic-wear manufacturer Nike is one company that is taking a number of eco-effective initiatives to explore new material and new scenarios of product use and reuse. One of the company’s agendas is to tan leather without questionable toxins, so that it is no longer a monstrous hybrid and can be safely composted after use. Because leather tanning affects so many products—including cars, furniture, and clothing—such an initiative could transform not one but several industries. Nike is also testing a clean new rubber compound that will be a biological nutrient and could likewise have a revolutionary impact on many industrial sectors. At the same time, the company is exploring innovations at the retrieval stage, attempting not only to make technical and biological nutrients but to put in place systems for retrieving them. The process is necessarily gradual—during this transitional period of introducing its new shoes, Nike separates and grinds the uppers, outsole, and cushioning midsole, and then works with licensees to create surfaces for sports activities (a fairly high-level use, still, as these materials offer protection from the elements as well as shock absorption). The goal remains upcycling, adapted to diverse locations and cultures, but not every avenue of exploration will pan out. As Darcy Winslow, Nike’s global director of women’s footwear, points out, in medium- and high-tech industries innovation typically has a success rate of 10 to 15 percent. The company is initiating several pilot programs to begin understanding the complexity of a product take-back program, with the expectation that one or several of those may end up working in the future. Nike sells products in approximately 110 countries, so the programs must be designed to incorporate regional and cultural relevancy.

  There are some things design innovators and business leaders can do to help steer the transition at every stage and improve the odds of success:

  Signal your intention. Commit to a new paradigm, rather than to an incremental improvement of the old. For example, when a business leader says, “We are going to make a solar-powered product,” that is a signal strong enough for everyone to understand the company’s positive intentions, particularly since total and immediate change is difficult in a market dominated by the status quo. In this case, the intention is not to be slightly more efficient, to improve on the old model, but to change the framework itself.

  Employees “down on the ground” need to have this vision in place at the top, especially as they encounter resistance within the company. Tim O’Brien, newly promoted to vice president of real estate for Ford, says: “I know where to get ‘yes’: the twelfth floor,” referring to the location of Ford’s forward-thinking senior management team. “There may be argument on what the next steps will be at Ford, but there is no argument on the direction.”

  It is important, however, that signals of intention be founded on healthy principles, so that a company is sending signals not only about the transformation of physical materials but also about the transformation of values. For example, if the solar collectors powering a new solar-powered company are made with toxic heavy metals and no thought is given to their further use or disposal, then a materials problem has simply been substituted for an energy problem.

  Restore. Strive for “good growth,” not just economic growth. Think of the ideas we have presented here—and of designs in general—as seeds. Such seeds can take all manner of cultural, material, and even spiritual forms. For instance, a dilapidated neighborhood can be planted with such seeds as a new transit system, innovative ways of providing services that are not linked to waste and sprawl, water purification, the increase of green space and the planting of trees for cleaner air and beauty, the restoration of old and crumbling buildings, the revitalization of storefronts and marketplaces. On a smaller scale, buildings can be restorative: like a tree, they can purify water and send it out into the landscape in a purer form, accrue solar income for their own operations, provide habitat (for instance, designers can make roofs and courtyards attractive
to birds), and give back to the environment. And, of course, design products that are restorative, as biological and technical nutrients.

  Be ready to innovate further. No matter how good your product is, remember that perfection of an existing product is not necessarily the best investment one can make. Remember the Erie Canal, which took four years to build and was heralded as the height of efficiency in its day. What its builders and investors had not reckoned on was that the advent of cheap coal and steel would assure the canal’s instant demise. The railroad was exponentially quicker, cheaper, and more convenient. By the time the canal was finished, the new niche and fitting-est technology for transportation had been developed.

  When the fuel cell is becoming the automotive engine of choice in the automotive industry, those companies focused on increasing the performance and efficiency of the internal combustion engine might find themselves left behind. Is it time to keep making what you are making? Or is it time to create a new niche? Innovation requires noticing signals outside the company itself: signals in the community, the environment, and the world at large. Be open to “feedforward,” not just feedback.

  Understand and prepare for the learning curve. Recognize that change is difficult, messy, and takes extra materials and time. A good analogy is that of developing a wing. If you want to fly, at some point you need the sloppiness of additional materials, the redundancy—and a stretch for the research and development—to grow a wing. (Many scientists believe that wings evolved as a secondary use for limbs with feathers for warmth.) Biologist Stephen Jay Gould has captured this concept nicely in a way that can be useful to industry: “All biological structures (at all scales from genes to organs) maintain a capacity for massive redundancy—that is, for building more stuff or information than minimally needed to maintain an adaptation. The ‘extra’ material then becomes available for constructing evolutionary novelties because enough remains to perform the original, and still necessary, function.” Form follows evolution.

  You may not even know today what it is that you need to grow in the future, but if all of your resources are tied up in basic operations, there won’t be anything extra to allow for innovation and experimentation. The ability to adapt and innovate requires a “loose fit”—room for growing in a new way. Rather than spend all its time and money fine-tuning an existing vehicle, for example, an automobile manufacturer might also be designing another car on the side: an innovative vehicle based on “feedforward.” Innovative design takes time to evolve, but rest assured, in ten years the “perfect” vehicle of today will be a thing of the past, and if you don’t have the new new thing, one of your competitors will.

  Exert intergenerational responsibility. In 1789 Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to James Madison in which he argued that a federal bond should be repaid within one generation of the debt, because, as he put it, “The earth belongs . . . to the living . . . No man can by natural right oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeeded him in that occupation, to the payment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living.”

  The context is different, but the logic is beautiful and timeless. Ask: How can we support and perpetuate the rights of all living things to share in a world of abundance? How can we love the children of all species—not just our own—for all time? Imagine what a world of prosperity and health in the future will look like, and begin designing for it right now. What would it mean to become, once again, native to this place, the Earth—the home of all our relations? This is going to take us all, and it is going to take forever. But then, that’s the point.

  Notes

  Chapter One. A Question of Design

  20 “Citys . . . are nothing”: John Clare (1793–1864), “Letter to Messrs Taylor and Hessey, II,” in The Oxford Authors: John Clare, edited by Eric Robinson and David Powell (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 457.

  21 Consider cars: James P. Womack, Daniel Jones, and Daniel Roos, The Machine That Changed the World (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 21–25.

  22 Henry Ford: Quoted in Ray Batchelor, Henry Ford: Mass Production, Modernism, and Design (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1994), 20.

  24 “power, accuracy, economy”: Ibid., 41.

  25 “essences unchanged”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 22.

  27 more than 90 percent: Robert Ayres and A. V. Neese, “Externalities: Economics and Thermodynamics,” in Economy and Ecology: Towards Sustainable Development, edited by F. Archibugi and P. Nijkamp (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic, 1989), 93.

  30 mutations and infertility: Marla Cone, “River Pollution Study Finds Hormonal Defects in Fish Science: Discovery in Britain Suggests Sewage Plants Worldwide May Cause Similar Reproductive-Tract Damage,” Los Angeles Times, September 22, 1998.

  31 The reality of global warming: DuPont, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Ford, Daimler Chrysler, Texaco, and General Motors have withdrawn from the Global Climate Coalition, a group backed by industrialists that discounts global warming.

  32 Regulations for airborne pollutants: The EPA is also adding statutes that manufacturers upwind of polluted areas are affected by regulations in those areas. See Matthew Wald, “Court Backs Most EPA Action in Polluters in Central States,” The New York Times, May 16, 2001, and Linda Greenhouse, “EPA’s Authority on Air Rules Wins Supreme Court’s Backing,” The New York Times, February 8, 2001.

  33 asphalt and concrete: In 1996 the impervious surfaces of the tristate metropolitan region around New York—the roads, buildings, parking lots, and nonliving parts—were measured at 30 percent. A generation ago this figure was 19 percent. The projection for 2020 is 45 percent. See Tony Hiss and Robert D. Yaro, A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York–New Jersey–Connecticut Metropolitan Area (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996), 7.

  35 single-minded cultivation: Wes Jackson has pointed out that the prairie as it was, with all of its diversity and grasses, actually produced more carbohydrates and protein per hectare than modern agriculture. But conventional agriculture has not engaged this rich ecosystem on its own terms.

  35 “a simplifier of ecosystems”: Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and John P. Holdren, Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1970), 628.

  35returning complexity: Many forms of “organic” agriculture that celebrate complexity and productivity are being developed around the world with rotations of animals and plants. For details, see the work of Sir Albert Howard, J. I. Rodale, Masanobu Fukuoka, Joel Salatin, and Michael Pollan. Another example of “homeostatic” (not single-purpose monocultural) farming, according to Wes Jackson, is the Amish agricultural method.

  37a simplistic economic figure: For an in-depth discussion of the GDP’s failures and a presentation of new measurements for progress, see Clifford Cobb, Ted Halsted, and Jonathan Rowe, “If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, 59.

  38Since 1987: Michael Braungart et al., “Poor Design Practices—Gaseous Emissions from Complex Products,” Project Report (Hamburg, Germany: Hamburger Umweltinstitut, 1997), 47.

  39 “a formal risk assessment”: Wayne R. Orr and John W. Roberts, “Everyday Exposure to Toxic Pollutants,” Scientific American, February 1998, 90.

  40 legislation establishing: Legislation is just beginning in Sweden.

  41 a child’s swim wings: Braungart et al., “Poor Design Practices,” 49.

  41 Consider endocrine disruptors: See Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962; rpt. New York: Penguin Group, 1997), and Theo Colburn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers, Our Stolen Future, for an in-depth look at the effects of synthetic chemicals on human and ecological health.

  Chapter Two. Why Being “Less Bad” Is No Good

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bsp; 45 “I have read”: Thomas Malthus, Population: The First Essay (1798) (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 3, 49.

  46 “in Wildness”: Henry David Thoreau, “Walking” (1863), in Walden and Other Writings, edited by William Howarth (New York: Random House, 1981), 613.

  46 “When I submit”: Quoted in Max Oelshaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 217.

  48 “hundreds of millions”: Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), xi, 39.

  48 “Then the fuse”: Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population Explosion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 9, 11, 180–81.

  49 “If the present”: Quoted in Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, and Jorgan Sanders, Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future (Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green, 1992), xviii.

  49 “Minimize the use”: Ibid., 214.

  49 “The idea of unlimited growth”: Fritz Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1973; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1989), 31, 34, 35, 39.

  50 “The simple truth”: R. Lilienfield and W. Rathje, Use Less Stuff: Environmental Solutions for Who We Really Are (New York: Ballantine Books, 1998), 26, 74.

  51 “What we thought was boundless”: Joan Magretta, “Growth Through Sustainability: An Interview with Monsanto’s CEO, Robert B. Shapiro,” Harvard Business Review (January–February 1997), 82.

  51 “You must get the most”: Quoted in Joseph J. Romm, Lean and Clean Management: How to Boost Profits and Productivity by Reducing Pollution (New York: Kodansha America, 1994), 21.