Relevance: Cradle to Cradle

by William McDonough and Michael Braungart

     As the quotes show, Cradle to Cradle is both a remarkable call to action and a roadmap that shows how to proceed. While the arguments presented are powerful, the book's most powerful aspect for me was the actual, physical book itself--how it was a manifestion of the need to rework an entire process in which a need--in this case to create a book--is met in a fully sustainable way. Cradle to Cradle allows readers can hold in their hands a credible and satisfying solution to the question of how can we do something old in a new, fully sustainable way.

     Windward is undertaking to do practical research into the question of how to do that in enough ways that we're able to create a critical mass of sustainability--one key to achieving that goal lies in having clear principles that allow us to look at the various options and sort out the ones that lead to sustainable outcomes from the ones that trade one dependency for another. Cradle to Cradle offers a clear standard to follow by making the case that it's not enough to make a bad system less bad; rather, that we need to find ways to transition to a system in which all outputs serve as inputs for other activities that create value and fulfill our needs.

     Like any other serious enterprise, Windward started out with a high degree of dependency on the economic system in which it took root. Over the years since then, we've undertaken to wean the organization off that dependency, and to a large extent we've been successful in accomplishing that goal, or at the least in developing the resources needed to break that dependency if the need for that degree of rigour should present itself in the future.

     For example, we use a gasoline powered chainsaw and hydraulic wood splitter to process dead trees into firewood because that's the most epiditious way to proceed for now. If the "Crude Awakening" come to pass and gasoline became relatively unavailable and we couldn't get the parts needed to convert an engine over to methanol, we have "fall back technology" in reserve such as the two-person trunk saw pictured below.

  


     It's worth noting that a hundred years ago, that type of saw was often called "a misery stick," which should give you an idea why the relative cost of gasoline would have to increase many fold before we would feel compelled to switch over to doing it the old way full time. Still, there's a comfort in knowing that we have the option should the need arise.

     And indeed, if we had to we even have the tools needed to take a leaf spring off a car and forge another saw blade, so we're okay for now with using the most efficient current technology as we transition ourselves to cradle-to-cradle solutions such as earth-sheltering and the use of geothermal heat to maintain occupancy temps without using a lot of firewood.


Notes From Windward - Index - Vol. 67