On Unintelligent Design

It's Earth Day again, 35 years later, not that you can tell we've learned much in that time. (Bush's horrid environmental record was barely a blip on the campaign trail last year, especially among us evangelical Christians, who seem to be slow in clueing in to the fact that God cares about the world that God created.) Now, just in time for the Earth Day anniversary celebration, the House has voted to allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, along with a lot of other dirty pork.

Apparently we need it. Our economy needs it. And don't forget, our addictive "use of energy is a reflection of the strength of our economy, of the way of life that the American people have come to enjoy. The American way of life is a blessed one, and we have a bounty of resources in this country."

So said the president's mouthpiece. Of course, this attitude extends beyond energy policy and deep into our daily lives. We consume voraciously, leaving behind great mounds of garbage and deep pits of toxic sludge, poisonous air and water. You've heard it all before. What you may not have considered, though, is that it's not completely our fault as consumers (though it is largely that).

There are at least two places that blame falls for the problem of a global economy fueled by dirty consumption (and probably more).

The first, as we've all heard many times, is with us. We use more than we should. What we have is disposable so we can only use it once. We try to recycle, and we do it sometimes, but it's hard. (We've all heard the old mantra, 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle,' but it's a big enough step for most of us to even reach the lowest rung on that ladder and actually recycle all that we could.)

I'm not going to dwell on that. It's important. We all need work. Don't forget it.

There is another aspect that I want to particularly focus on. Certainly some of the blame for our cultural consumption patterns falls directly on the designers of the products on the shelves, the corporations that manufacture them, the wonks that come up with and perpetuate the policies our government supports. One of the capstone classes I took in college can be summarized like this: 'Nothing is morally neutral--the things we make (products, businesses, policies) have a tendency to push us in a positive or negative direction and as Christians we need to rethink many of our cultural assumptions and practices with this in mind.'

I find one particular aspect of this 'rethinking' in the 'cradle to cradle' design principles, which start with the premise that waste product is a failure of design, and that mimicking natural, cyclical processes is critical to a successful design. ("Cradle to Cradle Design is a system of thinking based on the belief that human design can approach the effectiveness and elegance of natural systems by learning from nature and incorporating its patterns. Industry can be transformed into a sustaining enterprise--one that creates economic, ecological, and social value--through thoughtful and intentional design that mirrors the safe, regenerative productivity of nature and eliminates the concept of waste." About Cradle to Cradle Design)

You've heard the phrase 'cradle to grave,' meaning from the time something is made to the time it is disposed of. This is the point where we generally start trying to solve the problem--nuclear waste, garbage, landfills, exhaust fumes, and so on. "Cradle to cradle" design starts much earlier and emulates a process parallel to plant growth and composting: the vegetation that we do not eat breaks down and fertilizes the next round of growth.

The designer bears responsibility for what happens to the product after its useful life is over--how can it be disposed of or reused appropriately? This is different than recycling--which is often "down-cycling," meaning that the product that results is generally lower on the chain then what you started with. (For example, the three different kinds of metal that are layered in an aluminum can are melted into one blended, inferior metal in the recycling process).

It's worth noting that the environmental sphere is only one aspect of this 'non-neutrality'--there are more. An automatic machine gun may be built so that it is completely biodegradable--the fact that it is engineered to kill many people quickly is another aspect of the design that is not morally neutral.

So poor design bears responsibility for products that encourage waste�or, waste and pollution are failures of the design process. Likewise, poor policy and decision-making bear responsibility for the direction countries tend in areas like energy consumption. ('Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer also dismissed suggestions that high energy costs should change American lifestyles. "That's a big no," he told reporters. "It should be the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life."')

An economy based so heavily on oil is a failure of policy design. You often hear that things are the way they are because that's how the economy works--you don't often hear that it works that way because it was designed poorly. Why should complying with Kyoto be an economic hardship? Because it makes companies innovate and stay ahead of the technological curve? Because it preserves or improves environmental conditions?

Why does dirty energy get so much money in subsidies? Why do we need to drill in ANWAR instead of requiring better design in automobile efficiency? Because of a policy design failure. ("The Bush [first term] energy plan, for example, called for more than $35 billion in subsidies over ten years to [dirty energy] industries, while calculations by some energy experts suggest that total federal subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power amount to as much as $21 billion a year. A wind production tax credit, meanwhile, will give the wind power industry -- the fastest growing energy sector in the world-about $5 million for each of the next two years. Rather than allowing innovation and markets to drive the energy economy, subsidies prop up an economy built almost entirely on a single energy source....If we begin now to develop commercial enterprises around proven cradle-to-cradle design protocols, the U.S. can become a world leader in intelligent design and resource recovery, rather than competing on uneven and unhealthy terms within the old industrial system. This would not only protect the health and well being of American consumers, it would nourish the American economy and the American land. It would also yield exceedingly profitable, effective benchmarks to export to developing nations, rather than exporting harm." -McDonough, Waging Peace)

Listen to these figures, from the same article referenced above:

• Texas, North Dakota and Kansas have enough wind energy to meet America's electricity needs.
• In Nevada, 100 square miles could produce enough solar electricity to meet the energy needs of the entire nation.
• Germany has already harnessed wind power equivalent to twenty coal-fired power plants and the European Union plans to generate 22 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2010.
• Wind power is now available for less than 4.5 cents per kWh, and up to 90 "green pricing" programs nationwide allow consumers to choose wind and other renewables."

Not focusing on renewables seems like a huge design failure in our country's policies. The cynics among us will claim that this won't work nationally and it won't work on a corporate level, but there are examples of companies that have seen the light. Notably, carpet manufacturer Interface, Inc. took a 180 degree environmental turn when Ray Anderson, the founder, had a change of heart and decided to be pro-active instead of just complying with the minimum government requirements. For ten years, the company has been a leader in the push towards sustainability. ('Each choice we make has a "cost." True cost is a combination of the economic, social and environmental costs set against the offsetting benefits associated with each choice that we make.')

I'll end with a comparison/contrast from MBDC, a product and process design firm that uses Cradle to Cradle design strategies:

"Consider looking at the industrial revolution of the 19th century and its aftermath as a kind of retroactive design assignment, focusing on some of its unintended, questionable effects. The assignment might sound like this: Design a system of production that

• Puts billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water, and soil every year
• Produces some materials so dangerous they will require constant vigilance by future generations
• Results in gigantic amounts of waste
• Puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved
• Requires thousands of complex regulations to keep people and natural systems from being poisoned too quickly
• Measures productivity by how few people are working?
• Creates prosperity by digging up or cutting down natural resources and then burying or burning them
• Erodes the diversity of species and cultural practices

Does this seem like a good design assignment?...

We are proposing a new design assignment where people and industries set out to create the following:

• Buildings that, like trees, are net energy exporters, produce more energy than they consume, accrue and store solar energy, and purify their own waste water and release it slowly in a purer form.
• Factory effluent water that is cleaner than the influent.
• Products that, when their useful life is over, do not become useless waste, but can be tossed onto the ground to decompose and become food for plants and animals, rebuilding soil; or, alternately, return to industrial cycles to supply high quality raw materials for new products.
• Billions, even trillions of dollars worth of materials accrued for human and natural purposes each year.
• A world of abundance, not one of limits, pollution, and waste."