EARTHKEEPING NEWS A NEWSLETTER OF THE NORTH AMERICAN COALITION FOR CHRISTIANITY AND ECOLOGY Volume Seven, Number Five July/August 1998 HOW DO WE LOVE ALL THE CHILDREN? by William McDonough Excerpts from a lecture in St. Paul MN, January 1998, sponsored by Business for Social Responsibility. Dr. McDonough is Dean of the School of Architecture, University of Virginia, and founder of its Institute for Sustainable Design, 206 Campbell Hall, Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville VA 22903; 804/ 924-6454; www.virginia.edu/~sustain. Design is the first signal of human intention. A fundamental design question we now use in our work is "how do we love all the children?" Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence as a design for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness free from remote tyranny, in the person of George III. If Thomas Jefferson were to return today, "she" would be calling for a declaration of interdependence, life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and freedom from intergenerational remote tyranny. To make new designs for interdependence, we clearly need some new principles. Where in the Bill of Rights do we give the right to individuals, companies or governments to pollute air, rivers and soil and kill children? We need to re-examine the basic ethical principles we are using. One of most important things to look at is the relationship of our commerce and our government. In her remarkable book, Systems of Survival Jane Jacobs points out two syndromes for survival -- the Guardian and Commerce. The Guardian -- the state, the university, -- is very slow, has consistent attitudes, and preserves the state. The state reserves to itself the right to murder. If you threaten the state, it will go to war. It also reserves to itself the right to be duplicitous. The CIA is legal. Government doesn't give these rights to Commerce. The Guardian shuns commerce. Commerce has completely different characteristics -- it is fast, inventive, highly creative. And it is honest -- because you can't do business with someone very long if you're not honest. But as soon as Commerce and the Guardian get enmeshed in each other's affairs, they become a monstrous hybrid which starts to fail. If you put government into business (e.g. regulations) you slow it down. Why would the Guardian want to regulate Commerce? Because Commerce, for example, took from the Guardian the right to kill. When Commerce proposes to pollute, and toxify children, the Guardian has to step in. It says, "Wait a minute, we reserve the right to kill. You don't have that right." So they regulate. Regulation is a signal of design failure, because you're trying to kill somebody. What if we could eliminate regulations by design? Let's examine the results of the first industrial revolution. Is a system of production ethical that: puts billions of pounds of toxic material into your soil, water and air every year; measures your prosperity by how much of your natural capital you can cut down, burn up, bury, or otherwise destroy; measures productivity by how few people are working; measures progress by the number of smoke stacks that you're so proud of, you put your name on them; requires thousands of complex regulations to prevent you from killing each other too quickly; and creates a few items that are so highly toxic they will require thousands of generations to maintain constant vigilance while living in terror? No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it. (Einstein). We need a new set of design assignments for the next industrial revolution: Let's: measure productivity by how many people are working; measure prosperity by how much of our natural capital we can put into closed cycles, and continually renew for future generations' sake; measure progress by how many buildings have no pipes. Let's not require complex regulations because we are not trying to kill each other. Our work (at the Design Institute) is based on three principles: Waste equals food. This eliminates the concept of waste. Nothing should be designed unless it goes back to the soil to be consumed safely, or into the technical industrial cycle safely. Use current solar income, and Respect diversity What is going on now will not work. If we want to honor that which is sacred in each and every one of us, let's celebrate the abundance of what we have. Not just efficiency by being less bad, but our abundance of good will, creativity, and safe materials. That is the only way we can keep our children's children (to the seventh generation) free from the intergenerational tyranny that is us, and our bad design. Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, Random House,New York 1992, appendix on commercial and guardian moral syndromes. Return to text Home     Table of Contents