Conscious Choice: The Next Industrial Revolution

April 1999

The Next Industrial Revolution

by William McDonough

There’s an old joke that went, "When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." I’m a designer, everything looks like design to me, and I just keep hammering on the same nail, so here I go.

Design is the first signal of human intention. Let’s imagine for a moment the retroactive design assignment of the Declaration of Independence. If I asked you to design that for me, what would the assignment look like? From my perspective, the assignment would be: Could you design a document that allows for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness free from remote tyranny? Now in this case, remote tyranny would have been George III, and he also had it applied to six percent of the population, white land-owning males. But you realize that the signal and intention — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — would mean we would have to imagine that, if Mr. Jefferson was returning today, he would come back calling for Declarations of Interdependence.

Then we would be looking at the Bill of Rights, and realizing as Rachel Carson did that we have to ask the question: When did we give the right to individuals, companies, or governments to pollute rivers and kill children? When did we do that? Where is it in the Bill of Rights? We realize that today perhaps she would be calling for a Bill of Responsibilities.

The University of Virginia has sort of lost its original way and needs to be rethought. We’re designing an energy-exporter addition to the school of architecture right now. Jefferson understood these things. He wrote a letter to James Madison in 1789 in which he said, to paraphrase: The earth belongs to the living. No man may by natural right oblige the lands he owns or occupies to debts greater than those that may be paid during his own lifetime. Because if he could, then the world would belong to the dead and not to the living. So the retroactive design assignment that we’re trying to give ourselves is this: How do you love all of the children? Not your children, not some of the children, all of the children. Because in the end it is that great Six Nations notion of the seventh generation that the great peacemaker gave the six tribes, the Iroquois, the instructions to make all decisions on behalf of their seventh generation, even if it required them to have skin as thick as the bark of a pine. That seventh-generation notion is really about loving all children, because it’s interesting to note that the people sitting in this room are Thomas Jefferson’s seventh generation. You are it. So it’s time for us to develop our Declarations of Interdependence.

Let’s do a retroactive design assignment quickly of the first industrial revolution. Could you design a system for me that produces billions of pounds of finely hazardous toxic material and puts it in your soil, your air, and your water every year? Could you design a system for me that measures your prosperity by how much natural capital you can dig up, cut down, bury, burn, otherwise destroy? Could you measure productivity by how few people are working? Could you measure progress by your number of smoke stacks, and, if you’re especially proud, put your names on them? Could you require thousands of complex regulations to keep us from killing each other too quickly? While you’re at it, produce a few items so highly toxic they will require thousands of generations to maintain constant vigilance while living in terror. Can you do that for me? Is this ethical? Is this an ethical design assignment?

We, all of us, are designers. We all have intentions. We need a new design assignment. Design a system that doesn’t produce any hazardous toxic material, and put it in your soil, your air, and your water. Measure prosperity by how much natural capital you can put into constant closed cycles that are healthy and propitious, and measure progress by how few buildings you have that have smokestacks. How about buildings that have no pipes? Not little pipes — no pipes. Imagine designing a system that doesn’t require any complex regulations, because you’re not trying to kill each other, and that does nothing to create intergenerational remote tyranny. Wouldn’t that be more interesting?

What we’re talking about here is not necessarily just becoming more efficient. We are not just celebrating efficiency. What we’re going to do is celebrate abundance. We are not going to celebrate limits, we’re going to celebrate the joy of fecundity. So in that context, this isn’t about just being less bad and our goal is zero. What kind of legacy is that?‘Here kids, wake up in the morning feeling guilty. Try and be better by being less bad. Your goal is zero.’ It’s time to reimagine the world.

So let me pause at the design principles we work for and render them humble because we’re just doing our best. It’s not very good, but it’s the best we can do right now given all the things we have ahead of us. Waste equals food. This is not‘minimize waste.’ This is‘eliminate the concept of waste.’ Use current solar income. Nature doesn’t mine the past borrowed for the future. Thirdly, respect diversity. No two places alike, no two people alike. Cultural diversity. Biodiversity. Thermal diversity.

Since waste equals food, let’s design a fabric that can go back to the soil safely. We did it out of the wool from happy sheep in New Zealand. We used ramie [a fiber] organically grown in the Philippines, and once we had developed that, it’s not ideal because there’s still transportation. There’s lots to do. Then we realized that the dyes, finishes, polishes, fire retardants and so on were all part of this product. We went to the chemical industries in Europe and said. "Here, the filters of the future will be in our heads, not on the ends of pipes. They will be intelligence filters." Here’s the filter: No mutagens, no carcinogens, no heavy metals, no persistent toxins, no bioaccumulative substances, no endocrine disrupters. Who wants to work with us? Sixty chemical companies shut down in three days. It was amazing.

So we went to the chairman of Ciba Geigy, and we explained our protocols and their potential impacts on his business which is quite astonishing. He said, "You’re right, I’m letting you in." Michael Braungart and his chemist looked at 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry, and with that intellectual filter had to eliminate 7,962. We were left with 38 chemicals. We did the entire fabric line with 38 chemicals. It’s completely safe. You can eat it. It won some medals and it’s doing quite well in the marketplace. But there’s two things that are really astonishing to me. One is that his waste is now mulch for the garden club. Also, when the Swiss inspectors came to the factory to inspect the water coming out, as they had to do by law, they thought their equipment had broken. They couldn’t find things they expected to find in Swiss drinking water. So they tested the equipment on the incoming water, and they discovered that the fabrics were further filtering the water. When it turns out that the effluent from the textile mill is cleaner than the water going in, you realize you just hit what I call the next industrial revolution. You’re not trying to kill anybody anymore. Regulations are signals of design failure. When you’d rather use your effluent than influent you can cap the pipe. There’s nothing more to regulate.

From a design perspective, how sophisticated are we humans? It’s time to come up with a new set of principles, because imagine this: think of the most high-tech building you’ve ever been in. Design something for me that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, makes nitrogen, provides habitat for hundreds of species, distills water, changes with the seasons, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes food, builds soil. How are we doing? How many buildings do you know that have made oxygen lately? How sophisticated are we? Working closely with people like Amory Lovins who’ve been thinking about these things for a long time, and being inspired by all the people you’ve been hearing from, we designed a building that makes more energy than it needs to operate, and it purifies its own water to drinking water standards. It has a living machine John Todd is designing at the entrance of the auditorium. The students will actually be engaged in the building didactically and be able to think of a building like a tree. Imagine if all our buildings were able to do that.

We should take this creative thing that we have in us — it’s a sacred thing, it’s a gift — and we should celebrate our abundance and we should make sure that we are not designing things that create intergenerational remote tyrannies for our children’s children’s children’s children’s children’s children. Because in the end that is the only gift we have.

William McDonough is an architect at the forefront of ecological design and the Dean of Architecture at the University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson.

This article was reprinted from The Collective Heritage Letter, Vol.1, No. 2, where it appeared as part of its "Voices of the Bioneers" section.

The Bioneers are biological pioneers using nature to heal nature. They are visionaries with both feet on the ground who have demonstrated real solutions to many of our most pressing environmental problems. They are an improbable collection of social and scientific innovators spanning a wide diversity of projects and cultures. The annual Bioneers Conference brings together this dynamic culture where these optimistic discoveries point to a future environment of hope.

The 1999 Bioneers Conference will be held October 29-31, at the Marin Center, just outside of San Francisco. For more information, contact the Collective Heritage Institute toll-free at: 877-BIONEER or visit their web site.

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