A Boat for Thoreau

One good example of a designing mind is architect William McDonough. In a beautiful essay called “A Boat for Thoreau” McDonough suggests that we currently live in a world that’s not designed well, a world that consumes natural capital without replacing it, and that produces more waste than the biosphere can handle effectively. McDonough complains that our society effectively measures the good life by how much natural capital can be converted to money. We measure productivity by how few people are working. We produce billions of tons of toxic materials and call them “side effects” or “externalities.” We are exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet. And we threaten the health of the future for the wealth of the present.

In this context, McDonough says:
We must again ask ourselves, "What is natural?" and, "What are our intentions as evidenced by our designs?" Early in the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to Europe on a sailboat and returned on a steamship. . . . He went over on a solar-powered recyclable craft operated by crafts persons practicing ancient arts in the open air. He returned in a steel rust bucket putting oil on the water and smoke in the sky, operated by people working in the dark shoveling fossil fuels into the mouths of boilers. We are still designing steamships. Most buildings we design are essentially steamships. On any given day, the sun is shining and we're inside with the lights on causing the production of nuclear isotopes, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, and sulfur dioxide. Every time you find yourself in a building illuminated by electric light when the sun is shining, you should think, "I am in a steamship. I am in the dark." We need a new design. We need a boat for Thoreau.

“A boat for Thoreau” is McDonough’s metaphor for the ecological design of the Next Industrial Revolution, and he has begun to work on designs for a society that
• introduces no hazardous material into the soil, the air, and the water every year
• measures prosperity by how much natural capital and how much solar income we can accrue in productive and fecund ways
• measures productivity by how many people are being gainfully and meaningfully employed
• measures progress by how many buildings have no smokestacks, no dangerous effluents, and no pipes
• does not require regulations to stop us from killing one another too quickly
• produces nothing that will require future generations to maintain vigilance and live in terror

In his architectural practice, he has designed buildings for a long list of clients including Gap, Wal-Mart, Ford Motor Company, and Oberlin College. Oberlin’s Environmental Studies building is a good example of the possibilities of ecological design. In collaboration with David Orr other members of the college community, McDonough designed the Adam Joseph Lewis Center to include natural light in generous spaces, forest-certified woods and sustainable materials, a living machine to purify all wastes on site, a prairie restoration, solar panels on the roof—and real-time information panels that track the buildings performance. In time, the building’s solar arrays will generate more electricity than the building needs. So it’s not just an academic building, it’s a power plant. Like other plants, it’s good for its environment—and its inhabitants.

But McDonough hasn’t limited himself to architecture. Working with chemist Michael Braungart, he has offered new designs for the stuff in all our lives. Instead of manufacturing products that go from cradle to grave, Braungart and McDonough want products to mimic the nutritional feedback loops of nature. In their book, Cradle to Cradle, they argue that “Waste is food,” so they design “ecologically intelligent” materials and processes that keep all materials in a continuous stream of productivity. They suggest that we can’t keep throwing our junk away, because on an interdependent planet there’s no such place as “away” anymore.