Please Litter!

William McDonough and Michael Braungart's new book "Cradle to Cradle" doesn't feel like a book. It's an odd size and shape; it has unusually thick pages; it feels significantly heavier than it looks, and it's waterproof.

The book's peculiar design is deliberate, a point its content drives home -- the current state of recycling generally turns higher quality products into lower quality ones useful only for a purpose other than the original product that are eventually discarded. This is not recycling; it's slow-motion waste.

"Cradle to Cradle," is intended to be easily and completely recyclable into a new book of the same quality. The book's authors argue in favor of making all human productions either recyclable in the way this book is or completely biodegradable so that they can be used as fertilizer.

In the future envisioned by McDonough and Braungart, packaging will be tossed on the ground in response to signs that read "Please litter!" Appliances will be leased and returned to manufacturers to be completely recycled. Objects that must contain both biodegradable and inorganic recyclable elements will be easily separable into those respective parts: You'll toss the soles of your shoes into the garden and give the uppers back to the shoemaker. And the water coming out of factories will be cleaner than what came in, motivating the factory owners to reuse it and eliminating the need for the government to test its toxicity.

The authors teamed up on the 1991 Hannover Principles to guide the design of the 2000 World's Fair. McDonough has an architecture firm in Charlottesville, Virginia, and from 1994 to 1999 was dean of the University of Virginia's School of Architecture. Braungart is a German chemist who for several years headed the chemistry section of Greenpeace.

This book should be read by those familiar with the issues of environmental design as well as those completely new to the topic. It draws on themes common in a long list of books ranging from Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" to "Natural Capitalism," by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins. But McDonough and Braungart make no acknowledgements of any such influences and present themselves (just as these other authors have) as the vanguard of a change as radical as the industrial revolution.

While their idea is important and well stated, it's not the clear break from current environmental (or for that matter industrial or "Third Way") thinking that they maintain. What the authors propose as revolutionary is that instead of reducing pollution and consumption and having fewer children, why not make increased economic activity actually beneficial to the planet?

The book is packed with intriguing questions, such as: "What would have happened, we sometimes wonder, if the Industrial Revolution had taken place in societies that emphasize the community over the individual, and where people believed not in a cradle-to-grave life cycle but in reincarnation?"

Although McDonough and Braungart are not themselves activists, and seem to imply a power-to-the-corporations agenda, they provide plenty of inspiration for people-oriented activism: "Wouldn't it be wonderful if, rather than bemoaning human industry, we had reason to champion it? If environmentalists as well as automobile makers could applaud every time someone exchanged an old car for a new one, because new cars purified the air and produced drinking water? If new buildings imitated trees, providing shade, songbird habitat, food, energy, and clean water? If each new addition to a human community deepened ecological and cultural as well as economic wealth? If modern societies were perceived as increasing assets and delights on a very large scale, instead of bringing the planet to the brink of disaster?"