 What I'm trying to look at is how do we make humans supportive of the natural world in the way that the natural world is supportive of us? So what we're trying to do is say wouldn't it be marvelous if the built environment was not a dead thing? It was a living thing. Then nature and humanity merge once again. With a lot of people they don't understand that we don't have an energy problem. We have plenty of energy. We have a carbon problem. We have a material problem, not an energy problem. Something like 40% of the anthropogenic carbon that produced by humans since 1850 is now in the oceans, not in the atmosphere. And by the end of the century it'll drop the pH, the acidity, of the oceans as expected to approach 7.9 pH. Which is the point at which calcium carbonate goes into solution and we dissolve the coral reefs and mollusks can form shells. And we drop out the bottom of the food chain. So if that's our intention, we're doing great. If it's not our intention, what is our design intention? And I think we need a new design intention as a species because we are now the dominant species. And with all the large mammals under human management, it's time for us to express our intentions by design. So we're looking for the idea of a positive building. See, most people are out there looking for a less bad building. You'll hear people talk about being carbon neutral. Well, why would I want to be carbon neutral? For one more kilowatt hour, 13 cents, I would be energy positive, isn't that something? You're that close and yet you don't see the idea that you could be positive. You're still in the mind frame of being bad and wanting to be less bad, or zero. We hate zero as a goal. Zero is not a goal. When you hear all these people talking about zero emissions, zero emissions, that's not what nature does. You don't go down a street and look at a tree and go zero emissions. You'd be telling the tree to stop making oxygen. That's ridiculous. We want positive emissions, not zero emissions. And we want positive energy, not zero carbon. We really want to frame each question in a positive way and get on with the design so it's practical and fun. My sense is if society continues the way it's going, we will be able to celebrate probably between one and two billion people on the planet by mid-century, and seven billion will be in destitution. And as a designer, that's just unacceptable, because we can celebrate abundance instead of bemoan our limits. And as long as designers are sitting here wringing their hands over trying to be less bad, what they're doing is bemoaning their limits. And when environmentalists get up and say, oh, we have a population problem, that scares me too, because that means that some little kid in India is being born. And some environmentalist in New England is saying, oh, that kid's a population problem, then human rights don't exist if that kid's a population problem. Our design assignment is to make sure that that child is loved and celebrated and brought into a world of abundance that we share. And when you say to that kid, you know, we share plastics all over the world and use them over and over again, and now they're all safe. And you get to share those things too. We have a world of abundance in which you can share and manifest your creativity, your hopes, and your ambitions as a person. And that's what we're going to hear to celebrate. Your creativity as an individual as part of a society. And then our designs are then focused on that kind of thing. If we don't do this, we will be in a world of limits and a world of resource constraints. And we'll be having a difficult time sharing. We'll become greedy. And so this is a key design assignment for the celebration of the human experience. Otherwise it's going to be pretty mean on a lot of people. This to young people is just common sense. Well, I've never heard anybody say, well, that doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense to toxify people. It doesn't make any sense to destroy the planet. It doesn't make any sense to destroy economies by bad design. And I think that the young designers can recognize the humility that's required on the part of the design professions now. Because just because you have an older mentor doesn't mean that that older mentor actually gets it. Whereas in the old days, it was just handing down instructions. When I was at Yale, as a student, a very, very, very famous architect came what was teaching there. And he came over and he looked down at my work. I was designing the first solar heated house in Ireland as an earnest student doing my best. And nobody else was talking about these things, so nobody to go to really. We had a couple of professors who were interested in these things, but it really wasn't part of the world. It still isn't of the design world. It's just starting still. But anyway, he stood looking over me. He's supposed to be my mentor and guide. And he looked at me and said, young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture. You imagine? There were only two of us in that class that were really thinking about this. And it was a real breaking point for me because I had to realize I have to break away from what it means to be a known thing in the architecture universe to a place that we're going to that's now unknown, but so attractive, so delightful, so hopeful, so rich and so generous and so full of goodwill instead of some arcane egoistic focus on positioning and place in a profession or in a community. This is a really big thing. The idea that buildings have a 30-year life or 25-year life is of concern because on the one hand, we believe in planned obsolescence as designers here. It's just that our obsolescence timeframes depend on the product. So after the Second World War, the idea of planned obsolescence was that in a consumer, quote, society, they wanted to change the toaster's favorite color from yellow to avocado or something every other year so that people would be compelled to buy new ones and they were pushing consumption using planned obsolescence. So you always felt like your object was out of date and you needed a new one. It was to push that. Now, under the Cradle to Cradle protocols, we have a whole series of opportunities. One would be designed for durability, we call those durables, clearly, and that would be to design something that you really want to use a long time and that's a nice strategy, but it's not sufficient for modern society because if you think about a car, I don't really want, except for Mercedes-Benz 58 Roadster or something, a car that lasts me 50 years. What I really want is the latest in safety, the latest in mobility, the latest in features, the latest in communication systems, and so on. So we think cars should last about five years and then their materials should all be redeployed into new cars that are better mileage, safer materials, just upgrade the technology with innovation very quickly. And in that sense, we believe in planned obsolescence. But it's not because we're trying to foist new products on people who don't need them. What we're trying to do is upgrade the innovation and keep people working. See, there's a really big issue. If all we do is create products for durability, then there's not going to be any more work and we need work. So in certain cases like cars, we want them to cycle every five, ten years. Now in case of buildings, I think once you move to infrastructure, you start to see that there's a different lifetime in a cradle to cradle flow where infrastructure wants to last a long time, a road, a bridge. You don't want to be replacing your bridges every 25 years. Now buildings, well, I mean a metal shed, no problem, replace the building. You know, an office building converted to an apartment building. I think there's a lot of issues around that. Especially when we find that the embodied energy, the energy needed to make the building is pretty much equivalent to the energy used by the building. And so they're almost equal, surprising. And so what we see when we tear down buildings really quickly is an immense amount of embodied energy built, being wasted on the first front by tearing it down and then being added when they build a new one. So we just finished a building design that's now under construction for NASA. And NASA came to us. I'd give a speech at Houston at the Space Center where they heard the words, you know, Houston, we have a problem. That's where I wanted to be. And we basically said, Houston, we have a problem. Let's build your advanced research center out in NASA Ames near Moffitt Field in San Francisco. But let's do it with your rocket scientists. And let's imagine that we call it mission to planet Earth, we come in peace. And let's imagine that we build a building we've never seen one before on this planet. And we land here and all we know is what you know. What would we build? And how would we build it? Well, where's the energy going to come from? And it's not a question of balancing between oil and gas and this and that. We just said, where's the energy come from? And we looked around and we weren't going to dig a hole and pull coal out of the ground. We weren't going to go build a nuclear plant. We looked up in the sky and said, look, it comes across here every day. It's eight minutes. It's wireless. It's thermonuclear reactor fusion, you know, which we've all dreamed about. And there it is. And that's where our energy comes from. Just the way NASA scientists invented the photovoltaic for satellites. So we said, fine, this will be a solar powered building. Next. And we said, where's the coolness come from? Well, do we look around for air conditioners? No. We look down. And what do we see? Earth and coolness. So we dig down and get our coolness. Air comes over our left shoulder. Water comes in the sky from the ground, et cetera. Anyway, we ended up designing a building that in demand uses one-tenth of a lead platinum building. One-tenth, which means we can solar power it plus. It's going to be 30% more solar power than it needs, which means the building will pay back its embodied energy mortgage. All the energy needed to make the building will be paid back, as well as its operations. That's pretty exciting. The water, 13% of an advanced lead building. And most of that's lost to evaporation. And then sewage. When we told all the NASA scientists, you know, we have pee and poop in the water, what are we supposed to do about that? You should have seen their enthusiasm. They're all putting their hands up going, we know how to deal with this. We do it every day, right, in space. So we said, that's your job. So all of a sudden, the building has zero sewage. Zero sewage. So what is the building doing? It's producing nutrients. That's different. It's producing more energy than it needs. It's producing nutrients. What does that mean? This means in my sort of poetic look at physics that we're dealing with negative entropy. Imagine that. Typically we all talk about how everything's being dispersed and destroyed. We're burning the wood and the fire is dispersing all the energy out into the world and it can never be brought back. Things like that. Here we're looking at nutrition. We're looking at the idea we aggregate again. We're like a tree. We're actually accruing the energy of the sun dispersed in leaves and turning it into the log that most people are burning. We're making the log. We're building the tree. We're taking solar energy and creating life. Cradle to cradle came out of some work I was doing with Dr. Michael Browngard, a German chemist. And what we are looking at is the industrial production system we currently have in the world is what we call cradle to grave. That's how it's known. And essentially it says you take materials from the cradle, either a mine or a forest or whatever and then you manufacture with it and then you bury it or burn it. And essentially it's a Northern European strategy that is based on the idea that nothing rots. So in Northern Europe we had to bury things to get them out of our site. And so if we think about the first industrial revolution, if it had occurred in India, for example, things would be in reincarnation mode and things would be returning to new lives and returning, but not in Northern European. We have a one-way flow, take, make, waste. And so we still, it's landfills and incinerators at the end of life. Now what's exciting about cradle to cradle is we simply look at that loop and say, OK, cradle through manufacturing, but instead of grave or crematorium, what if we could just bring that back and then make it make the polymers that are part of the plastics that are part of the supply chain go through being a package, for example, come back out as a nutrient for the next round of packaging. It has five fundamental vertebra. It says determine whether you're a biological or technical nutrient and parse it. That's the first thing. So we know that this has to be safe and healthy for the biosphere. We know that this has to be in reverse logistics for the technosphere. Then you develop your reverse logistics, what we call nutrient management plans. So now you know where your stuff is going and then how it's going to get home. Then the third is it uses renewable energy. This is not reduce your carbon. This is use renewable energy. That's the way the world works. It uses the sun for energy income in order to have growth. We can do the same. Then fourth is you release clean water, not use less water. We hear people saying reduce your water, but think of a textile mill in China. The river runs black. The fish are dead. The children can't swim. And you tell that mill to reduce their water consumption. All they're going to do is concentrate the toxins. So what we do is redesign the chemistry of the mill. Go from 250 undefined chemicals leading to ecological and human health risk. And we define it down to 38. And now the water coming out of the textile mills clean enough to drink. That's cradle to cradle design. And then the last one is social fairness. We have to make sure we treat each other fairly. If you see it as a design universe, then you realize that our jobs as designers are to make the world a better place, not a worse place. And so we can look at these products and say, well, let's redesign them, because if they're making people sick or destroying the planet, they're ready for redesign. And what's your new intention? Because you have this retroactive design assignment. If a building is releasing immense amounts of carbon, is it your intention to double-glace the planet and acidify the oceans? Is that your intention? Because that's what you're doing. So the next question would be, if your intention is to love all the children of all species for all time, then would you do that?