A must for every library and every concerned citizen. This enlightened and enlightening book shows us how-and indeed, that God is in the details. Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club Achieving the great economic transition to more equitable, ecologically sustainable societies requires nothing less than a design revolution-beyond todays fossilized industrialism. This book will give you renewed hope that, indeed, it is darkest before the dawn. Asking how a cherry tree would design an energy efficient building is only one of the creative practices that McDonough and Braungart spread, like a field of wild flowers, before their readers. Review Quotes Environmentalists too rarely apply the ecological wisdom of life to our problems. Elaborating their principles from experience (re)designing everything from carpeting to corporate campuses, William McDonough and Michael Braungart make an exciting and viable case for change. Products might be designed so that, after their useful life, they provide nourishment for something new-either as biological nutrients that safely re-enter the environment or as technical nutrients that circulate within closed-loop industrial cycles, without being downcycled into low-grade uses (as most recyclables now are). Why not challenge the notion that human industry must inevitably damage the natural world? In fact, why not take nature itself as our model? A tree produces thousands of blossoms in order to create another tree, yet we do not consider its abundance wasteful but safe, beautiful, and highly effective hence, waste equals food is the first principle the book sets forth. But as this provocative, visionary book argues, this approach perpetuates a one-way, cradle to grave manufacturing model that dates to the Industrial Revolution and casts off as much as 90 percent of the materials it uses as waste, much of it toxic. Book Synopsis A manifesto for a radically different philosophy and practice of manufacture and environmentalism Reduce, reuse, recycle urge environmentalists in other words, do more with less in order to minimize damage.

Cradle to cradle by william mcdonough