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  In all of these cases, the agenda to recycle has superseded other design considerations. Just because a material is recycled does not automatically make it ecologically benign, especially if it was not designed specifically for recycling. Blindly adopting superficial environmental approaches without fully understanding their effects can be no better—and perhaps even worse—than doing nothing.

  Downcycling has one more disadvantage. It can be more expensive for businesses, partly because it tries to force materials into more lifetimes than they were originally designed for, a complicated and messy conversion and one that itself expends energy and resources. Legislation in Europe requires packaging materials that are made of aluminum and polypropylene to be recycled. But because these boxes are not designed to be recycled into new packaging (that is, to be reused by the industry to make its own product again), compliance results in additional operating costs. The components of the old packages are often downcycled into lower-quality products until they are eventually incinerated or landfilled anyway. In this instance as in many others, an ecological agenda becomes a burden for industry instead of a rewarding option.

  In Systems of Survival the urbanist and economic thinker Jane Jacobs describes two fundamental syndromes of human civilizations: what she calls the guardian and commerce. The guardian is the government, the agency whose primary purpose is to preserve and protect the public. This syndrome is slow and serious. It reserves the right to kill—that is, it will go to war. It represents the public interest, and it is meant to shun commerce (witness conflicts over capital campaign contributions from vested interests).

  Commerce, on the other hand, is the day-to-day, instant exchange of value. The name of its primary tool, currency, denotes its urgency. Commerce is quick, highly creative, inventive, constantly seeking short- and long-term advantage, and inherently honest: you can’t do business with people if they aren’t trustworthy. Any hybrid of these two syndromes Jacobs characterizes as so riddled with problems as to be “monstrous.” Money, the tool of commerce, will corrupt the guardian. Regulation, the tool of the guardian, will slow down commerce. An example: a manufacturer might spend more money to provide an improved product under regulations, but its commercial customers, who want products quickly and cheaply, may be unwilling to absorb the extra costs. They may then find what they need elsewhere, perhaps offshore, where regulations are less stringent. In an unfortunate turnaround, the unregulated and potentially dangerous product is given a competitive edge.

  For regulators who are attempting to safeguard whole industries, the readiest solutions are often those that can be applied on a very large scale, such as so-called end-of-pipe solutions, in which regulations are applied to the waste and polluting streams of a process or system. Or regulators may try to dilute or distill emissions to a more acceptable level, requiring businesses to increase ventilation or to pump more fresh air into a building because of poor indoor air quality due to off-gassing materials or processes. But this “solution” to pollution—dilution—is an outdated and ineffective response that does not examine the design that caused the pollution in the first place. The essential flaw remains: badly designed materials and systems that are unsuitable for indoor use.

  Jacobs sees other problems with “monstrous hybrids.” Regulations force companies to comply under threat of punishment, but they seldom reward commerce for taking initiatives. Since regulations often require one-size-fits-all end-of-pipe solutions rather than a deeper design response, they do not directly encourage creative problem-solving. And regulation can pit environmentalists and industries against each other. Because regulations seem like a chastisement, industrialists find them annoying and burdensome. Since environmental goals are typically forced upon business by the guardian—or are simply perceived as an added dimension outside crucial operating methods and goals—industrialists see environmental initiatives as inherently uneconomic.

  We do not mean to lambaste those who are working with good intentions to create and enforce laws meant to protect the public good. In a world where designs are unintelligent and destructive, regulations can reduce immediate deleterious effects. But ultimately a regulation is a signal of design failure. In fact, it is what we call a license to harm: a permit issued by a government to an industry so that it may dispense sickness, destruction, and death at an “acceptable” rate. But as we shall see, good design can require no regulation at all.

  Eco-efficiency is an outwardly admirable, even noble, concept, but it is not a strategy for success over the long term, because it does not reach deep enough. It works within the same system that caused the problem in the first place, merely slowing it down with moral proscriptions and punitive measures. It presents little more than an illusion of change. Relying on eco-efficiency to save the environment will in fact achieve the opposite; it will let industry finish off everything, quietly, persistently, and completely.

  Remember the retroactive design assignment that we applied to the Industrial Revolution in Chapter One? If we were to take a similar look at industry under the influence of the eco-efficiency movement, the results might look like this:

  Design a system of industry that will:

  release fewer pounds of toxic wastes into the air, soil, and water every year

  measure prosperity by less activity

  meet the stipulations of thousands of complex regulations to keep people and natural systems from being poisoned too quickly

  produce fewer materials that are so dangerous that they will require future generations to maintain constant vigilance while living in terror

  result in smaller amounts of useless waste

  put smaller amounts of valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved.

  Plainly put, eco-efficiency only works to make the old, destructive system a bit less so. In some cases, it can be more pernicious, because its workings are more subtle and long-term. An ecosystem might actually have more of a chance to become healthy and whole again after a quick collapse that leaves some niches intact than with a slow, deliberate, and efficient destruction of the whole.

  Efficient—at What?

  As we have seen, even before the term eco-efficiency was coined, industry generally viewed efficiency as a virtue. We would like to question the general goal of efficiency for a system that is largely destructive.

  Consider energy-efficient buildings. Twenty years ago in Germany, the standard rate of oil use for heating and cooling the average house was 30 liters per square meter per year. Today, with high-efficiency housing, that number has plummeted to 1.5 liters of oil per square meter. Increased efficiency is often achieved through better insulation (such as plastic coatings in potential air-exchange areas so that less air comes into the building from outside) and smaller, leak-proof windows. These strategies are meant to optimize the system and reduce wasted energy. But by reducing air-exchange rates, efficient homeowners are actually strengthening the concentration of indoor air pollution from poorly designed materials and products in the home. If indoor air quality is poor because of crude products and building materials, then people require more fresh air to circulate throughout the building, not less.

  Overly efficient buildings can also be dangerous. Several decades ago the Turkish government created inexpensive housing by designing and constructing apartments and houses which were built “efficiently,” with a minimum of steel and concrete. During the 1999 earthquakes, however, this housing easily collapsed, while older, “inefficient” buildings held up better. In the short term, people saved money on housing, but in the long term, the efficiency strategy turned out to be dangerous. What social benefit does cheap, efficient housing provide if it also exposes people to more dangers than traditional housing?

  Efficient agriculture can perniciously deplete local landscapes and wildlife. The contrast between the former East Germany and West Germany is a good example. Traditionally, the average amount of wheat produced in eastern Germany per acre has been only
half that of western Germany, because the agricultural industry in the west is more modern and efficient. The eastern region’s “inefficient,” more old-fashioned agriculture is actually better for environmental health: it has larger wetland areas that have not been drained and overtaken by monocultural crops, and they contain more rare species—for example, three thousand nesting pairs of storks, compared with 240 pairs in the more developed western lands. These wild marshes and wetland areas provide vital centers for breeding, nutrient cycling, and water absorption and purification. Today agriculture all over Germany is becoming more efficient, destroying wetlands and other habitats, resulting in rising extinction rates.

  Eco-efficient factories are held up as models of modern manufacturing. But in truth many of them are only distributing their pollution in less obvious ways. Less efficient factories, instead of sending emissions through high smokestacks into other areas far from the site (or importing them), tend to contaminate local areas. At least local destruction tends to be more visible and comprehensible: if you know what you are dealing with, you may be horrified enough to do something about it. Efficient destruction is harder to detect and thus harder to stop.

  In a philosophical sense, efficiency has no independent value: it depends on the value of the larger system of which it is a part. An efficient Nazi, for example, is a terrifying thing. If the aims are questionable, efficiency may even make destruction more insidious.

  Last but not least, efficiency isn’t much fun. In a world dominated by efficiency, each development would serve only narrow and practical purposes. Beauty, creativity, fantasy, enjoyment, inspiration, and poetry would fall by the wayside, creating an unappealing world indeed. Imagine a fully efficient world: an Italian dinner would be a red pill and a glass of water with an artificial aroma. Mozart would hit the piano with a two-by-four. Van Gogh would use one color. Whitman’s sprawling “Song of Myself” would fit on a single page. And what about efficient sex? An efficient world is not one we envision as delightful. In contrast to nature, it is downright parsimonious.

  This is not to condemn all efficiency. When implemented as a tool within a larger, effective system that intends overall positive effects on a wide range of issues—not simply economic ones—efficiency can actually be valuable. It is valuable too when conceived as a transitional strategy to help current systems slow down and turn around. But as long as modern industry is so destructive, attempting only to make it less bad is a fatally limited goal.

  The “be less bad” environmental approaches to industry have been crucial in sending important messages of environmental concern—messages that continue to catch the public’s attention and to spur important research. At the same time, they forward conclusions that are less useful. Instead of presenting an inspiring and exciting vision of change, conventional environmental approaches focus on what not to do. Such proscriptions can be seen as a kind of guilt management for our collective sins, a familiar placebo in Western culture.

  In very early societies, repentance, atonement, and sacrifice were typical reactions to complex systems, like nature, over which people felt they had little control. Societies around the world developed belief systems based on myth in which bad weather, famine, or disease meant one had displeased the gods, and sacrifices were a way to appease them. In some cultures, even today, one must sacrifice something of value in order to regain the blessing of the gods (or god) and reestablish stability and harmony.

  Environmental destruction is a complex system in its own right—widespread, with deeper causes that are difficult to see and understand. Like our ancestors, we may react automatically, with terror and guilt, and we may look for ways to purge ourselves—which the “eco-efficiency” movement provides in abundance, with its exhortations to consume and produce less by minimizing, avoiding, reducing, and sacrificing. Humans are condemned as the one species on the planet guilty of burdening it beyond what it can withstand; as such, we must shrink our presence, our systems, our activities, and even our population so as to become almost invisible. (Those who believe population is the root of our ills think people should mostly stop having children.) The goal is zero: zero waste, zero emissions, zero “ecological footprint.”

  As long as human beings are regarded as “bad,” zero is a good goal. But to be less bad is to accept things as they are, to believe that poorly designed, dishonorable, destructive systems are the best humans can do. This is the ultimate failure of the “be less bad” approach: a failure of the imagination. From our perspective, this is a depressing vision of our species’ role in the world.

  What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to be 100 percent good?

  Chapter Three

  Eco-Effectiveness

  HERE’S A TALE of three books.

  The first is familiar. It is about five inches by eight, compact and pleasant to hold. Dark ink makes a crisp impression on the creamy paper. It has a colorful jacket and a sturdy cardboard cover. In many respects, it is an intelligently conceived object, designed—as were its very similar predecessors, hundreds of years ago—with portability and durability in mind. Hundreds of users may check it out of the library. They take it to bed, on the train, to the beach.

  Yet attractive, functional, and durable as it is, the book will not last forever—nor, if it is “beach reading,” do we necessarily expect it to. What happens when it is discarded? The paper came from trees, so natural diversity and soils have already been depleted to keep us in reading matter. Paper is biodegradable, but the inks that printed so crisply on the paper and created the striking image on the jacket contain carbon black and heavy metals. The jacket is not really paper, but an amalgam of materials—wood pulp, polymers, and coatings, as well as inks, heavy metals, and halogenated hydrocarbons. It cannot be safely composted, and if it is burned, it produces dioxins, some of the most dangerous cancer-causing material ever created by humans.

  Enter book number two. It too is rather familiar to contemporary eyes. It has the usual book shape and format, but the paper—a dull beige—is thin and porous. It has no jacket, and the cover, like the inside, is printed in a single shade of ink. It may seem a little drab, but it has a humble, “earth-friendly” look that is instantly recognizable to the environmentally minded. And indeed the book is the product of a concerted attempt to be eco-efficient. It is printed on recycled paper—hence the beige—with soy-based inks. In addition, its designers strove to “dematerialize,” to use less of everything; witness the thin, uncoated text stock and the absence of a jacket. Unfortunately, the ink shows through the flimsy paper, and the lack of contrast between ink and page strains the eyes. The skimpy binding is a little weak to boot. The book isn’t exactly reader-friendly—good thing it’s eco-friendly.

  Or is it?

  Its designers thought long and hard about what kind of paper to use; every choice had drawbacks. Initially they thought chlorine-free paper might be a good way to go, because they knew that chlorine presents a serious problem for ecosystems and human health (by creating dioxins, for example). But they discovered that totally chlorine-free paper required virgin pulp, because any recycled paper in the mix would already have been bleached. In fact, paper made from any kind of wood pulp probably contains some chlorine, because chlorinated salt occurs naturally in trees. What a quandary: pollute rivers or chew up forests. They ended up choosing paper with the greatest recycled content, avoiding what to their minds would be a greater offense. Soy-based inks posed another dilemma, because they might include halogenated hydrocarbons or other toxins that become more bioavailable in these water-soluble eco-friendly inks than they would be in conventional solvent-based inks. For acceptable durability, the cover was coated, so it isn’t recyclable with the rest of the book, and because of its already high recycled content, the paper’s fibers have about reached the limits of further use. Once again, being less bad proves to be a fairly unappealing option, practically, aesthetically, and environmentally.

  Imagine if we were to rethink
the entire concept of a book, considering not only the practicalities of manufacture and use but the pleasures that might be brought to both. Enter book three, the book of the future.

  Is it an electronic book? Perhaps—that form is still in its infancy. Or perhaps it takes another form as yet unimagined by us. But many people find the form of the traditional book both convenient and delightful. What if we reconceived not the shape of the object but the materials of which it is made, in the context of its relationship to the natural world? How could it be a boon to both people and the environment?

  We might begin by considering whether paper itself is a proper vehicle for reading matter. Is it fitting to write our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears, to echo writer Margaret Atwood? Let’s imagine a book that is not a tree. It is not even paper. Instead, it is made of plastics developed around a completely different paradigm for materials, polymers that are infinitely recyclable at the same level of quality—that have been designed with their future life foremost in mind, rather than as an awkward afterthought. This “paper” doesn’t require cutting down trees or leaching chlorine into waterways. The inks are nontoxic and can be washed off the polymer with a simple and safe chemical process or an extremely hot water bath, from either of which they can be recovered and reused. The cover is made from a heavier grade of the same polymer as the rest of the book, and the glues are made of compatible ingredients, so that once the materials are no longer needed in their present form, the entire book can be reclaimed by the publishing industry in a simple one-step recycling process.