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In early October,
The New York Times reported that the United States was preparing
to launch a $94 million counter-insurgency program to help the Columbian
military protect a 500-mile oil pipeline. The pipeline, which transports
100,000 barrels of crude oil a day for the Los Angeles-based energy
company Occidental Petroleum, has been regularly attacked by Columbian
rebels since the 1980s. In an effort to make Columbia safe for ongoing
oil exploration and meet one of the Bush Administration’s national
security goals—diversifying the sources of America’s oil—U.S.
military personnel will train 4,000 Columbian troops and supply
them with high-tech surveillance equipment and combat helicopters.
The Columbian army, in turn, will use this array of American technology
and know-how to defend the nation’s oil fields and take the
offensive in its decades-old civil war.
“We have been fighting here,” a Columbian officer told
the Times, “but there are still so many things the Americans
can teach us.”
Teaching counter-insurgency is not a new strategy in the search
for security. For many, it echoes an American tradition of strategic
intervention. But perhaps there’s a more secure approach. In
the midst of a civil conflict that has cost more than 35,000 lives
and displaced nearly two million people, what if we waged peace
as fiercely as we are prepared to wage war?
This, too, is an American tradition—and, having been born in
post-war Japan and Germany, it’s one for which we are personally
thankful. There is no denying that the outcome of World War II was
achieved with military power. But immediately after the war, American
might was harnessed to build democratic values and institutions.
The Marshall Plan, for example, distributed $12 billion over four
years to revitalize European nations, including West Germany. There,
aid fed hungry children, rebuilt the industrial infrastructure,
supported civil society and demonstrated the attractiveness of democracy.
In Japan, the military occupation was conducted in part by young
American couples—unarmed and disarmingly cheerful—who
visited even the smallest Japanese communities, all in the spirit
of peacemaking, good will and respect. Along with an infusion of
monetary aid, this intentional honoring of Japanese individuals
and cultural traditions yielded an ally and an economic partner.
The same was true in Europe. Where dictators had reigned, democratic
values emerged, and Japan and Germany became two of the world’s
most vital nations. The architects of their recovery plans? George
C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur, American generals bent on waging
peace.
Design and American Security
Today, we might try waging peace on the scale of the Marshall Plan
with the widespread application of intelligent design, a concerted
international effort to develop products, industrial processes and
social systems that support sustainable economic strength, cultural
diversity and environmental health. From this perspective, sustainable
design can be seen as one of the essential paths to peace and security.
Consider resource dependency. From the viewpoint of both sustainability
and international relations, reliance on a single, non-renewable
resource to fuel economic growth is a signal of a design problem.
In Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, for example, we see oil generate wealthy
elites, but no democratic institutions and no emerging intellectual
infrastructure to support long-term social well-being or economic
growth. In America, there are strong democratic traditions, but
today the U.S. spends up to $50 billion annually, as well as lots
of international good will, to protect the oil fields of the Persian
Gulf. South America is now emerging as the new, unstable oil arena.
How effective, productive and smart is an economy based on such
an energy system? And, if the current business model is indeed unsustainable,
how can intelligent design contribute to the creation of products,
services and systems that transform the American economy into a
model of healthy, safe and peaceful productivity? Given the powerful
influence of the United States on the global economy, these become
security concerns and design questions not only for Americans, but
for the entire world.
A Vulnerable Economy
Oil dependence disguises the weak spots in the design of the American
economy. Even if we leave aside tumbling stock values, rising unemployment
and the crisis in corporate accounting—what some might call
short-term problems in an otherwise healthy system—a business
cycle inextricably linked to a single, non-renewable resource screams
vulnerability.
So does the far-flung assembly line. As supply chains span the globe,
many U.S. manufacturers are importing materials and product components
that are causing health problems for American workers and for their
customers as well. This increases healthcare expenses for U.S. companies,
drives up costs for waste management, squanders material assets
and, ultimately, leads to more outsourcing for cheap materials—a
toxic flow of losses and liabilities that threatens long-term economic
strength.
Through the lens of sustainability, an energy market defined by
scarcity and a manufacturing sector reliant on toxic materials suggests
both design problems and opportunities for innovation.
Energy
In the energy sector, design problems and opportunities are signaled
by a playing field strongly slanted toward oil, with coal, natural
gas and nuclear power rounding out the U.S. government’s favored
energy sources. The Bush energy plan, for example, called for more
than $35 billion in subsidies over 10 years to those industries,
while calculations by some energy experts suggest that total federal
subsidies for fossil fuels and nuclear power amount to as much as
$21 billion a year. A wind production tax credit, meanwhile, will
give the wind power industry—the fastest growing energy sector
in the world—about $5 million for each of the next two years.
Rather than allowing innovation and markets to drive the energy
economy, subsidies prop up an economy built almost entirely on a
single energy source. From the perspective of both natural and economic
systems, in which more diversity means more health, we could say
the current system is woefully impoverished—and therefore weak
and unstable. The good news is renewable energy entrepreneurs are
entering the market on their own. Imagine the economic vitality
unleashed as they gain traction and begin to deliver the practical,
cost-effective innovations people are ready to support with their
pocketbooks.
Manufacturing
Design opportunities in the manufacturing sector are signaled both
by the well-known environmental impacts of industry and the increasing
application of sustainable alternatives to conventional cradle-to-grave
systems. Following our Cradle to Cradle DesignSM strategy, for example,
designers are developing products for closed loop systems in which
every ingredient is designed to be safe and beneficial—to either
naturally biodegrade and restore the soil or provide high quality
resources for subsequent generations of products. These biological
nutrients and technical nutrients allow manufacturers to generate
and recover value, rather than losing material assets when a product
moves out the warehouse door.
Less well known, perhaps, are the security concerns generated by
today’s more conventional manufacturers. Over the past decade,
American industry has been both utterly traditional and radically
revolutionary. While designing and manufacturing a fairly typical
array of products with fairly typical materials—that is, materials
with unexamined ingredients that often have adverse affects on human
and environmental health—it has begun to dismantle the traditional
assembly line, shifting it from the local factory floor to contract
manufacturers half a world away. Both strategies—the traditional
and the new—threaten product quality and the competitive advantage
of American industry.
Certainly, many corporations with manufacturing operations overseas
have seen their bottom lines grow as they have reaped the advantages
of cheap labor and a less strict regulatory environment. But the
increasing dispersal of supply and manufacturing has proved to be
a double-edged sword. Not only have many businesses overextended
themselves in the race for global reach, they are increasingly reliant
on factories and supply chains they do not own or manage. Consequently,
many products sold by American “manufacturers” are not
actually produced in the U.S., and further, when we ask for the
detailed chemistry of materials, few companies know what’s
actually in their products. Suddenly, it has become quite difficult
for a business to stand by measures of quality defined by the social
conditions of manufacturing or the environmentally beneficial effects
of product ingredients. Thus we have costly high-tech waste management
strategies for low quality products rather than high quality products
that eliminate the concept of waste. Transnational manufacturing
also sets up an economy in which a distant political crisis can
upset the steady flow of goods and services.
This business model is beginning to draw concern. As the business
journalist Barry Lynn writes, Cisco Systems became the largest manufacturer
of communications equipment in the 1990s by becoming a “virtual
company,” relying almost exclusively on outsourced production,
much of it offshore. Indeed, says Lynn, post-national manufacturing
has created “new forms of foreign dependence for the United
States that may soon leave us gazing fondly back to the days when
our nation was joined at the aorta only to such dear fellow citizens
of the world as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.”
“Why,” he wonders, “did we so grievously fail to
understand that running our ever more delicate assembly lines across
so many fault lines, political and tectonic, might endanger our
power and our well-being?”
A New Business Strategy
Why not support our power and well-being by supporting natural and
cultural diversity? Why not redesign our energy and manufacturing
systems so we can offer the world productive and profitable business
models built on design principles that enhance human, environmental
and economic health? If we begin now to develop commercial enterprises
around proven cradle-to-cradle design protocols, the U.S. can become
a world leader in intelligent design and resource recovery, rather
than competing on uneven and unhealthy terms within the old industrial
system. This would not only protect the health and well-being of
American consumers, it would nourish the American economy and the
American land. It would also yield exceedingly profitable, effective
benchmarks to export to developing nations, rather than exporting
harm. Additionally, as we renew product quality, we will also be
developing an intellectual infrastructure supporting the making
of things that will give us long-term security and prosperity, rather
than the tenuous promise offered by the policing of distant oil
fields.
Clearly, this is an ambitious strategy. Yet innovations in design,
business and government are already laying the groundwork for strategic
change. With the transition underway, here’s our strategy for
building a strong support system for peaceful economic renewal.
Intelligent Products
High-quality products are the cornerstone of a strong economy. From
a sustainable design perspective, quality is a measure of the degree
to which a product enhances peaceful prosperity, social equity and
environmental health. Within our Cradle to Cradle Design Protocol,
achieving high levels of product quality is a step-by-step process
of assessing the chemistry and full life cycle of materials so that
products can flow within closed-loop systems of manufacture, use
and recovery.
As we have seen, the world-spanning supply and assembly line makes
this problematic—but it’s hardly impossible. In an effort
to effectively manage its supply chain, the furniture assembler
Herman Miller has begun to specify a safe materials palette for
its suppliers. Nike, meanwhile, is working with offshore contractors
to enhance both product quality and workplace health and safety.
Both are attending to material chemistry because safe, healthful
materials are the key to resource recovery. Small companies are
not excluded. At any scale, manufacturers gain a distinct competitive
advantage by finding reliable sources for intelligent materials
and developing systems for their retrieval and reuse.
Materials Pooling and Corporate Cooperation
With the End-of-Life Vehicle Directive, long-term responsibility
for industrial materials became the law in the European Union. While
no such legislation appears to be on the horizon in the United States,
American companies can begin to recover the value of high-quality
industrial materials by participating in Intelligent Materials
Pooling.
Intelligent Materials Pooling is a collaborative, business-to-business
approach to managing the industrial metabolism. Partners in an intelligent
materials pool agree to share access to a common supply of a particular
high-tech, high quality material, pooling resources and purchasing
power to generate a healthy system of closed-loop material flows.
The process begins with an agreement to phase out a hazardous material
common to a number of companies. Out of this shared commitment to
intelligent design comes a community of companies with the market
strength to effectively engineer the phase-out and develop innovative
alternative materials. Together, the companies specify for preferred
materials, establish defined use periods for products and services,
and create an intelligent materials bank from which each partner
withdraws and deposits. This business support system built on cradle-to-cradle
principles gives companies the strength and know-how to make materials
flow management an ongoing harvest of assets rather than an endless
exercise in managing liabilities. Ultimately, it eliminates the
concept of waste.
Energy Effectiveness
Even when materials have been defined as safe and beneficial, the
energy required to illuminate and run the assembly line is likely
to depend on fossil fuels. This need not be so. Despite fossil fuel
subsidies, wind, solar and hydrogen power have become a viable alternative
to oil. Indeed, as energy writer Matt Bivens has pointed out, “America
is the Persian Gulf of wind.” Solar power is also abundant,
and the prospects for renewable energy have never been better. Bivens
and other energy watchers note:
* Texas, North Dakota and Kansas have enough wind energy
to meet America’s electricity needs.
* In Nevada, 100 square miles could produce enough solar
electricity to meet the energy needs of the entire nation.
* Germany has already harnessed wind power equivalent to
20 coal-fired power plants and the European Union plans to generate
22 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2010.
* Wind power is now available for less than 4.5 cents per
kWh, and up to 90 “green pricing” programs nationwide
allow consumers to choose wind and other renewables.
Each of these items is an example of energy effectiveness. Rather
than developing an expensive infrastructure to support a scare resource,
design for energy effectiveness taps the perpetually abundant forces
of the sun and wind to deliver clean, affordable energy to all,
as well as new opportunities for innovation. Imagine, for example,
the national rail system revitalized by wind power. Railroad rights-of-way,
in carefully selected locales, provide ample space for the production
of wind power, while the trains themselves are perfectly suited
not only for running on the converted energy of the wind, but for
carrying locally manufactured, 200-foot windmill blades to new sites
along the tracks.
From Regulations to Benchmarks
Intelligent products and systems are designed to be self-supporting,
enhancing productivity, profits and sustainability without the carrot
of subsidies or the stick of regulations. Yet not all companies
have the wherewithal to support the research and development required
to design materials so safe and beneficial they require no regulation
at all. Sustainable design can become the strategy of choice as
its knowledge base becomes widely available and widely promoted.
That’s why we have been working with the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency to develop new benchmarks that can be presented
to industry as alternatives to regulation. As the EPA and other
state and federal agencies support industry with design information
and know-how, American business will be able to choose good growth:
a healthy environment, a productive economy and a better quality
of life for all Americans—and for the rest of the world.
Principled Policy
We would also encourage new strategies on Capitol Hill. While a
government role is not required in the practice of intelligent design,
federal policy does affect the economic landscape and the principles
that guide civil society. Among them are those principles that shape
the relation between people and nature. For 30 years, a public dialogue
led by citizen activists and NGOs has firmly established that the
federal government, as well as state and local governments, will
be held responsible for protecting America’s air, water and
soil. Perhaps now is the time to broaden that conversation to include
a dialogue on the relations between economy, ecology and security.
What, in this insecure time, is the government’s role?
British Petroleum CEO Lord Browne has said that government should
level the energy playing field, eliminating the subsidies that support
fossil fuels. “We need to get the market to tell the ecological
truth,” he said in a recent interview.
While Lord Browne’s vision is not exactly popular in Congress,
Senators John Kerry and Jim Jeffords have proposed harvesting 20
percent of U.S. energy from renewable sources by 2020, while Kerry
and John McCain crossed party lines together to push for higher
fuel-efficiency standards. Is there a willingness among these and
other members of Congress to discuss energy and economic issues
in the context of peace, security and sustainable design?
We hope so. It’s time to carry the sustainable design dialogue
more deeply into the public realm. The transformation of the U.S.
economy depends on it. American security and the security of the
world depends on it. If, as the Columbian military officer suggested,
there are still so many things the world can learn from America,
what is it we will choose to teach?
By teaching intelligent design, by fiercely waging peace, we can
take the future into our own hands and shape a world in which our
children and our children’s children find prosperity, security
and health along with all the world’s citizens—and indeed,
along with all the creatures of the Earth.
William A. McDonough, FAIA, and Michael Braungart are founders
of McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, a consultancy that works
with a wide variety of companies to implement eco-effective design
and commerce strategies. For more information,
visit www.mbdc.com
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