Cradle to Cradle, And the Babies in Them

Cradle to Cradle breaks down consumption in the most invigorating way of any commodity-chain analysis that I have come to understand throughout the course of this class. The film "Stuff" illustrates our struggles with consumption as a baby-course to "the powers the be" in an non-transparent system. The system is so clearly broken, but the room for changes that McDonough and Braungart suggest in their implementation, and that Lauren has outlined below, do not seem sufficient to me. Power and money stand at such a point in the corporate world, and as evidenced in leadership ties to our American government, that the need to burn structures and find catharsis in redesign and ReNewed construction, so that our future is built out of the ashes of our waste is more urgent than ever before.

On that note, their backgrounds as innovators and designers means that in writing (and controlling the means of production of) their book, McDonough and Braungart are ensuring their continued employment. There is a temptation to continue to produce in order to maintain a consumer market. If we eliminate the sins of over-profit what would people work towards? Without an incentivized system for the scientists making paper out of waste, could their book have been produced? These and other questions arise that make me questions the precepts of growth and designers at the head of that growth. Some of those designers (not the authors discussed, necessarily) are the culprits of the greatest injustices on the Third World's peoples. Education needs redevelopment and constructive recycling as much as any Computer part. I tend to doubt the sincerity of designers out of the first world in their perceived ramifications for the Third World in the development of environmentally sustainable options for the future. I state my bias.

In the next century, the First World is not where we will see the most growth; our populations are declining or staying more level at least. The Third World will still cope with a population increase, a flood of Urban Centers, environmental crises that require environmentally concerned solutions. If the people who live in these areas are not producing their own answers to their problems, there will not be the safewords in place for how far the First World's designers can experiment on them. Technology is a fetish of our consumer culture in the United States. The dangers of exploitation exist in deep, entrenched values that we have already been feeling the backlash from. Education, and innovations for how that education is distributed and allocated, are really the largest priorities for the consumer cultures that are only burgeoning presences on the global markets today. "eco-efficiency," "mono" structuring of any kind, these are products of geo-political entities that are not owned by the people they will most deeply effect. It's time to recognize that design can only answer half of the questions in the commodity chain change. Who will be transforming our trash into Swatches?