Upcycle - Living Like Dersu

The sub-title for Upcycle, the new book by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, is Beyond Sustainability, Designing for Abundance.  McDonough is a celebrated, American architect/designer. Braungart is a German born design chemist. In this book, they tell the story of Dersu, hero of a Japanese movie, Dersu Uzala.  In this movie, Dersu is a woodsman who becomes guide to explorers passing through his remote forested region.  When a storm comes up, he leads them to shelter in a long disused cabin deep in the wilderness.  There they find dry firewood stacked inside, waiting to be used to warm the place.  After the storm,  Dersu is shocked when the explorers prepare to leave without replenishing the firewood for the next visitors. This is a wonderful metaphor for the way the society we know exploits the earth's resources relentlessly, without regard to the impact on those that will come after.

McDonough and Braungart believe that we humans must go beyond just lightening our footprints on the earth we are totally dependent on. We can, indeed we must, actually leave things better off when we depart than they were before we arrived.  It's a wonderful. idealisitic paradigm for living. 

Upcycle is not the first book from McDonough and Braungart.  A decade ago, they published Cradle to Cradle.  It offered their first reflections on learning to live with the biosphere instead of cravenly exploiting it and leaving it exhausted for future generations.   We have been mindlessly exploiting our planet's land, water, air, and biological resources for a very long time.  That is clearly no longer a viable approach to living. 

In their latest book, the authors seem almost giddy as they present case after case of upcycle thinking that showcase design processes that actually leave things better off than they were before the processes were initiated.  Improving what we were gifted with by generations that came before seems like a very worthy paradigm for humans to embrace.

The ideas showcased in Upcycle are not entirely new.  Urban farming in high rise structures or even below ground, using cost effective, artificial light sources has been around for awhile and has been demonstrated in various settings.  The Dutch model of growing food in greenhouses is especially compelling. What is new is the focus on designing processes and products that make the resources used in those processes and products readily available for recycling at the end of useful life. 

Here's an example from the book. Michael Braungart analyzed a TV set to see how many chemicals went into its production. The answer was 4,360. Most TV sets these days still end up in landfills. They are simply not designed to be reduced to reusable resource form at end of life.  Michael Braungart participated in a program with Phillips Electronics that resulted in the Econova TV, which was designed to be easily disassembled at end of life. It is also PVC-free and its cables are halogen-free.  This is a big leap forward.  All products and processes should be designed this way.  

Here is a lovely quote from the book...

The goal of the Upcycle is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil, and power - economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed.

I find this to be an incredibly noble sentiment and a motivation entirely worthy of we humans as a species.

I give this book my highest recommendation. I also include William McDonough and Michael Braungart on my list of most admired people.