“Cradle to Cradle” by William McDonough and Michael Braungart analyzes the authors’ point of how we, as humans, need to work together with ourselves and the environment to re-create a world that can sustain itself for an infinite amount of time, instead of the slow path to an unpleasant ending that we are currently on. Chapter one begins to illustrate their point by giving a summarized history of the industrial revolution and its bullet-pointed goals to design what would create a disgusting environment to live in. The two authors give examples from many different types of inventions and industries ranging from thread spinning wheels, all the way to cars. McDonough and Braungart state that the problem with early industrialists, designers, and engineers was that they did not see their designs as part of a larger system, outside of an economic one (page 24). A quote from page 27 “Everything else is designed for you to throw away when you are finished with it. But where is ‘away’? Of course, ‘away’ does not really exist. ‘Away’ has gone away,” reminded me of the video of William McDonough speaking that we watched in class. It was very neat to see it all connect back to what he was talking about in that lecture.
Chapter two begins by talking about how today we try to fix the problems that we have created by reducing, avoiding, minimizing, sustaining, limiting, and halting (page 45). However, only minimizing and limiting is simply nowhere near enough. Recycling, or downcycling as it is sometimes referred to as, can put more harmful chemicals into the environment than anyone would have ever guessed and can even lead to more negative consequences than positive ones. A quote on page 50 says “Recycling is an aspirin, alleviating a rather large collective hangover…overconsumption.” In the end, as the title of the chapter reflects, eco-efficiency and minimization is only being “less bad” and is not a good enough goal. Page 67 states that being less bad is really only accepting things the way are as the best that humans can do. McDonough and Braungart call it a completely “failure of the imagination.”
Chapter three starts out differently from its preceding chapters by analyzing the components that are put together to from three different books and how they are or are not designed any better for the environment. The only thing that I really didn’t like about this chapter was the way that Braungart and McDonough present themselves and their book in relation to the third, completely eco-friendly book. Although this would be a great achievement, the authors seem to present themselves as very “stuck-up” and somewhat better than everyone else. However, outside of this, my favorite part about this chapter would definitely have to be the authors’ description of a community of ants’ daily activities and how they work together with their surroundings to create a completely sustainable environment. It’s sad that we, as humans, are being shown up by a bunch of ants. The community of ants exemplifies the cradle-to-cradle cycle of nature that the book was titled after.
Chapter four continues to show mankind’s faults in this subject as the authors explain how many countries and cities began by being more environmentally sustainable than they are now. Everyone is beginning to become more like the United States…and that isn’t always a good thing. Page 96 states “Humans are the only species that takes from the soil vast quantities of nutrients needed for biological processes but rarely puts them back in a usable form.” The chapter later goes on to an in depth explanation of the two discrete metabolism processes – biological and technical. These two completely differing views on sustainability were actually very interesting to read and composed a large part of the chapter. However, my favorite part of the chapter was the long quote in the very last paragraph about insanity and negligence. The last two sentences read “ Now that we know, it’s time for a change. Negligence starts tomorrow.”
Chapter five works very well to explain how necessary interdependencies are in our environment. “The vitality of ecosystems depends on relationships: what goes on between species, their uses and exchanges of materials and energy in a given place” (page 121). I also learned about how beneficial local sustainability can be beginning on page 123. “Using local materials opens the doors to profitable local enterprise. It also avoids the problem of bioinvasion” (page 125). The chapter later then goes on to talk about how ultimately, we want to be able to design “processes and products that not only return the biological and technical nutrients they use, but pay back with interest the energy they consume.” This point is illustrated effectively through the authors’ soap example a few pages later. As designers, we would want to ask the question what kind of soap would the environment want to have?
The last chapter of the book works very well to wrap everything up and bring it all back together. The chapter begins by referring to Ford and his company just as McDonough and Braungart had in the beginning chapters. It then moves into the authors’ five steps to rethinking and redesigning and process or product in order to make it eco-effective. I really like how simply all of these ideas were laid out for the reader. The authors make everything sound so simple, almost as if it’s harder to be un-efficient or un-sustainable in the environment that we live in than it is to just be sustainable. The very last paragraph of the book was obviously very well planned out and was extremely well written. The last sentences “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,” does a perfect job of finishing off everything that was written about in “Cradle to Cradle.”
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