Taranaki ChangeMakers 5-10-5-10: William McDonough: Cradle to Cradle design

We listened to SJD singing Beautiful Haze. We checked in with what was inspiring us or irritating us: David Bain, Earthsong, opposition to S59.......

We watched William McDonough speaking about Cradle to Cradle design from the TED talks. Our conversation included the beauty of his design brief for a tree, touching and smelling a copy of his book made out of plastic and opening to the idea that synthetic products could be infinitely re-cycled and/or designed to decompose without a blueprint. The challenge to the hippie in us.

We were taken with the simple way he opened up the complexity of choices in manufacture and purchasing, with the simple contrast of the toxic duck and the nurturing baby blanket. He seemed to make the problems and the solutions look more complex and more simple at the same time.

We got talking about the failure of environmentalists to create systemic changes. We started to understand what systemic change might look like. We talked about the reaction to the complexity of life by the hippies and by the neo-hippies being an attempt at a personal solution to a systemic problem and thus doomed to fail. We considered that a return to Eden philosophy, reduction of footprint and of consumption not solving or changing things at the systemic level and not being enough. We need "Think global, act local, organize systemic change" perhaps.

We loved "for all the children of all the species for all time." I hope we come back to this question of what is systemic change and what creates it. I suspect it's connected with Bill Drayton's vision of everyone as a changemaker. We were inspired by the idea that business success and sustainability can go together and the examples of the living roof and the 7 Chinese cities.

His utopia does not ask us to reduce our lifestyle but rather to fit it in with the earth's biosphere so it does no harm and may, like some of his building produce more clean water or energy than which they absorb.

There were lots more dimensions to our conversation but I've left it a bit late to capture them.
We talked about veganism, and the impact on the planet of meat eating and a dairy culture. We wondered if anyone is working with technology to create a non-burping cow. We looked at the way he refutes the idea of a tragic response to the world's problems, that it's all going to go terribly bad and the inertia this generates. He certainly is part of the solution.

Lynne