According to eco-architect Bill McDonough, failure to protect the environment is intergenerational tyranny, and the key to saving the planet isn’t more regulations, but better design. In choosing to stake his professional future on an issue as potentially tedious as “the environment,” architect and designer William McDonough has become a master of the buzzword. He frequently challenges American businesses to “use current solar income” and remember that “waste equals food” while he champions the coming of the Next Industrial Revolution and outlines his eco-manifesto, which he calls the Declarations of Interdependence. McDonough, the University of Virginia’s dean of architecture, recently launched the Institute for Sustainable Design. Last year, DesignTex Inc. released a McDonough-designed line of fabrics made with biodegradable fibers and reengineered chemical processes. “They are so safe,” he says, “you can eat them.” (03/05/02)
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In the coming century employment, as we have come to know it, is likely to be phased out in most of the industrialized nations of the world. A new generation of sophisticated information and communication technologies is being introduced into a wide variety of work situations. These machines, together with new forms of business reorganization and management, are forcing millions of blue- and white-collar workers into temporary jobs and unemployment lines — or, worse, breadlines. Our corporate leaders, economists, and politicians tell us that the rising unemployment figures represent only short-term “adjustments” that will be taken care of as the global economy advances into the Information Age. But millions of working people remain skeptical. In the United States alone, corporations are eliminating more than 2 million jobs annually. (03/05/02)
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Daniel Quinn writes: I follow a strange rule that can be applied usefully to any subject whatever, whether it’s social investment, health care, human resources, or the technologies of peace. Here it is: IF THEY GIVE YOU LINED PAPER, WRITE SIDEWAYS. We are perpetually being presented with lined paper on which we are expected to write our thoughts, our lives, and indeed our futures. Nicholas Copernicus received a full sheaf of lined paper at the end of the fifteenth century, and some of those lines represented the physical arrangement of the universe as it was understood at that time. It was perfectly possible for him to be a respected astronomer so long as he did his work within the lines of the Ptolemaic system. But because he eventually saw that he had to write sideways against those lines, he knew that his most important work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543), could not be published until after his death. Albert Einstein similarly received a full set of lined paper as a young man, but his was a different sort of age. When he turned the paper sideways and began to work out his theory of relativity, this was very quickly recognized as an important contribution. Darwin, Freud, and Marx are other well known examples of people who took the lined paper they were given and turned it sideways to do important work that changed the world. (03/05/02)
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N. Arthur Coulter writes: Every human being is unique. We are not mass-produced according to some blueprint or master plan, each identical with the other. Each of us emerges from a different design, a different set of genes. But more than this, each of us has a unique history—a unique sequence of events that happened to us, together with our responses to those events and our reflections on the experience. Even identical twins, having duplicate genes, are distinguished from each other by their unique histories. In short, you are one of a kind. There is no other person in the world quite like you, there never has been, and there never will be. In addition to being unique, every human being is precious. It took a billion or more years of evolution to make you what you are—an evolutionary process that is itself unique. Moreover, you are a being of incredible complexity—the design of the human ear or the human eye, for example, is simply magnificent. As for the human brain, it is a supercomputer whose intricacies and powers are far, far in advance of any of the artificial computers, which simply imitate and expand the simplest of those powers. The fact that a computer can do arithmetic much faster than a human brain may be of interest, but the really remarkable fact is that human brains invented arithmetic and designed computers to do it. (03/05/02)
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