Dead Whales, Over-heated Planet, and Panic Attacks

When Fools lead the way, it's only Fools who follow

I think it was the idea that the biomass of ants on this planet was greater than that of humans (pg 16 Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things) that crystalized my full understanding of what it is I hate about my society; the authors write, 'ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productivity nourishes plants, animals and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for a little over a century yet it has brought about a decline in almost every eco-system on the planet. Nature doesn't have a design problem. People do.'

A couple of years ago I argued with my friend, BadMark, against continuously increasing production, eating more, consuming more, against industrial expansion into every nook and cranny. I compared human beings with our brother, the virus; a virus hops into a system using devious means, expands its community with speed, aggressively consumes the most nutritious elements (blood, semen) and upsets the system's balance; leaving behind its waste material in such large amounts the host system is poisoned and destroyed thus destroying the viral community. Then, when Lucien Bouchard's leg needs to be amputated and thrown out as toxic waste, a few survivors of the community make their way through the air to colonize and destroy another unlucky system.

Badmark argued the neo-con position: that prosperity required expansion; that a system that wasn't expanding was therefore contracting and getting smaller, weaker, less able to sustain wealth for its citizens; that consumption required waste as a by-product.

I had a Metis teacher in high school who said her great-grandfather, wearied by fighting European colonization, concluded that all resistance was useless. Not because Whites were more clever or able to present their cause more convincingly but because, 'they breed like flies.' He could have easily called it The White Infection.

Since 1962 and the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring our culture has been more and more aware that we are destroying the planet's eco-systems at a far greater rate than is sustainable. We are polluting, on a broad scale, faster than these systems can clean and filter our waste. Paul Erhlich's late 1960's warning about Earth's population bomb went unheeded and it exploded leaving 6 billion naked inhabitants tilling dead soil, eating pesticides and toxins, and living in their own waste with the promise of another 4 billion coming within 25 years.

Pretty depressing stuff for a Sunday morning. This pondering, and black frothy coffee, dovetailed nicely with a March 2004 article in the New Left Review called Planet of Slums, David Suzuki's Reader (which has been sitting at my bedside and ruining my sex life for a few months now) and the inconveniently depressing documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth (Al Gore putting an end to the 'argument' on the existence of global warming).

But McDonough's and Braungart's Cradle to Cradle isn't another jeremiad about the lack of sustainability in our current cultural and economic paradigms. It's written by an architect and a chemist. Not two professions one often joins together to enlighten a darkened brow and heart but that could be why they may have redefined the problem and suggested another way of thinking about things economic and environmental.

Braungart is a chemist, a co-founder of Germany's Green Action Party; he worked for Greenpeace as a science advisor and helped them protest more knowledgeably. McDonough is an American architect who studied the designs of the Bedouin and the Japanese, both cultures in which resources were (and are) scarce neccesitating simplicity and ingenuity.

The problem, say the authors, is that we are thinking about environmental issues from the the wrong angle. They argue we don't recycle as much as we downcycle (reuse things but in a weakened state). When we recycle plastic from bottles in our carpets we aren't doing much to resolve the problem of waste. 'The rug is still on its way to the landfill; it's just stopping in your house en route,' they write. Wrestling with the problem of reusing products, like plastic containers, and transforming them into other products, like rugs, often requires as much energy - and waste - as making a new carpet.

We need to think about reusing at the beginning of the design cycle and build recycling into the product itself; we need to question the use of toxins and pollutants at the design stage and ask, 'how will we take the useful elements from this product' once it is no longer useful as itself without releasing toxins and pollutants in the process.

If we use this paradigm in designing products, systems and processes we can become an inherent, and useful, part of the various eco-systems that surround us. In short, our waste becomes food for another component of the system. What if our designs were good?

'As long as human beings are considered bad, zero [waste, zero emissions, zero ecological footprint] 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 that 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 view of our species' role in the world.

What about an entirely different model? What would it mean to 100 percent good? (pg 67 Cradle to Cradle)

As it stands, beached whales are so polluted that we need to treat them with toxic hazard response teams and thus those whales are effectively removed from the cycle of the eco-system. As it stands we are losing topsoil at a mad rate, our rivers are being turned into toxic sludge, species are dying off at a daily rate. Who do we turn to for comfort, leadership, or for guidance?

Whose going to eat this society when we're done with it?

Let's reconsider being good?

Cradle to Cradle can be purchased at your local bookstore. Click here for the BCIT bookstore.

xoxo

M

Vancouver, BC