[wordup] Musings from Verdopolis: Bill McDonough

[Adam Shand]

> "According to McDonough, our current culture does not have an end 
> game, and without that plan, “We’re just moving chess pieces around.” 
> He suggested (and has indeed done so to the governments of many a 
> nation) that we get one. Pronto. If our end game is climate change, 
> well, gosh darn it then, we’re doing pretty well. But the true of 
> humanity, rationalizes McDonough (insert Socratic word games here) is 
> the pursuit of happiness and liberty. So how do we get it? Via Design, 
> of course."

A'Fucking'men.

Adam.

From: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/02/musings_from_ve.php

Musings from Verdopolis: Bill McDonough
By treehugger on events

What should have been the highlight of the conference yesterday—an 
address by cradle-to-cradle inventor and emporer Bill McDonough—was 
disappointingly delivered via DVD. But no matter, we won’t let that get 
us down. Though there was obviously no q+a, his message still took full 
effect: It took us 5,000 years to put wheels on luggage.

Well, that was sort of the point, in terms of humankind being a bit 
slow, adapting when we could sometimes evolve, and being a bit 
foggy-minded and unfocused. Still, and more importantly, McDonough 
discussed his “strategy of hope,” and his goal for the human race, 
which, we think you’ll agree, is quite noble and honest: a delightfully 
diverse and healthy world with clean air and clean water, to be enjoyed 
elegantly by the children of all species for all time...

According to McDonough, our current culture does not have an end game, 
and without that plan, “We’re just moving chess pieces around.” He 
suggested (and has indeed done so to the governments of many a nation) 
that we get one. Pronto. If our end game is climate change, well, gosh 
darn it then, we’re doing pretty well. But the true of humanity, 
rationalizes McDonough (insert Socratic word games here) is the pursuit 
of happiness and liberty. So how do we get it? Via Design, of course.

After more longwinded, twisted, interesting, and, yes, believable, 
talk, here’s the conclusion: If what we celebrate in both cities and 
nature is diversity—and in a city that includes color, music, lights, 
fashion, change—and the forms we create follow that celebration, then 
indeed, what we form can lead to the path of righteousness and 
happiness. Form follows function and form follows celebration--it may 
adapt, evolve, and change, but it also creates diversity, which in 
turn, leads to the path of happiness. Then he unsurprisingly called for 
a necessary and high-speed change to the way we are living, designing, 
and thinking.

The idea of a Verdopolis, says he, is thousands of years old, but along 
the way, we’ve encountered many design failures. Pollution, for 
example, is a design failure. And we are trying to design it out at 
many different levels—at the molecular level, at the finished-product 
level and at an environmental level—but we haven’t quite gotten yet. 
But really, we--as citizens, designers, consumers, and 
corporations--have no right to pollute. McDonough likened the idea to 
the Bill of Rights: We may have the right to bear arms, but we don’t 
have the right to shoot and kill people. In the same way, we have the 
right to design, but we don’t have the right to pollute. An interesting 
way of looking at it.

McDonough is a funny man, and a compelling speaker, which, surely, is 
one of the reasons why he’s at the head of this revolution. He’s also a 
hopeful man, and ended his video speech with a strange, but intriguing 
point. Paraphrasing an OPEC member who was asked what would happen when 
the world reached the end of the oil age (hey, that’s now!), he said, 
“The Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones.” That is to 
say, man is inventive, and McDonough is hopeful that humanity will 
figure out the next step. We just need to figure out what that means a 
little faster than we thought of putting wheels on luggage. 
::Verdopolis ::Cradle to Cradle [by MO]

Posted on: Sat, Feb 12 2005 10:31 AM

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: william_mcdonough.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 8360 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.spack.org/pipermail/wordup/attachments/20050213/a9a8eebb/attachment.jpg 
-------------- next part --------------