LIBERATION FROM THE MECHANISTIC MINDSET

“Right now we are a real pain for this planet,” Dr. Michael Braungart remarks to me on the phone one evening. “But it's only because we are not liberated from the idea that we are bad for the planet and should therefore have fewer human beings or minimize our ecological footprint.” While at first I find it hard to follow him—perhaps it's the German accent—as he continues to speak, his inspired ideas about human enterprise reveal a fresh view on the future that is as magnificent and awe-inspiring as the butterfly's emergence from the cocoon. No longer in the grip of the machine mentality, Braungart weaves one vision of transformation after another. The car turns into a “nutra-vehicle”—what he calls the twenty-first-century buffalo. Not only is nitrogen collected from its exhaust and turned into fertilizer, but every emission from the car is consumable and the car itself is consumed—recycled—in the production of the next line of cars. Industrial upholstery fabrics, notoriously toxic, are now benign enough to eat and miraculously clean the air around you as you sit. This is not science fiction. Braungart is a brilliant chemist, and the mentor and partner of architect Bill McDonough, with whom he coauthored the groundbreaking book Cradle to Cradle. His living systems perspective is a stunning leap out of the mechanistic paradigm: human beings are fundamentally inseparable from the cycles of nature, and should create in alignment with the principles that inform the living planet. Moreover, it takes us far beyond the current belief that life on earth can only become sustainable by restraining our activity and impact on the planet.

“I'm proposing a positive agenda which says, 'Hey, isn't it so nice to see human beings on this planet?'” he explains, speaking rapidly in a soft voice from his home in Hamburg, where he has just put his daughter to bed. “Instead of trying to minimize our damage here, let's think about how human beings could support other species. Because less bad is not good. We call it 'environmental protection' if we destroy a little bit less. It's the same as if I were to say to my little daughter, 'Hey, honey, I'm protecting you—I only beat you five times instead of ten times.' That's no protection. We're feeling bad about being on this planet because we went through a process of emancipation from nature and now we feel bad for what we did during that process. We try to compensate for this by feeling guilty about being here.”

Our emancipation from embeddedness in the natural world brought us into the mind of the machine. However, “this split was necessary,” Braungart insists, reminding us that before the life-enhancing creativity of modernity, “we would have been compost at the age of thirty.” (Remarkably, the word “creativity” only came into use in the late nineteenth century at the height of the machine age.) Only after humanity was able to look objectively at nature and try to figure out its workings did human invention take off—the cotton gin, the steam engine, the railroad, the telegraph, the electric light, and on and on. However, as we have begun to wake up to the consequences of this cultural achievement—to the effect of our mechanistic consciousness on the natural world and on each other—our collective response has been a guilty attempt to minimize our negative impact. Yet, ironically, this position is still within the framework of the mechanistic mindset because it fundamentally assumes our separation from nature. It's in this respect that Braungart's cradle-to-cradle thinking literally reveals another level of consciousness. It not only frees our creative potential from rigid mechanical design but also frees us from our separation from the living world to enable human creativity to be generative and life-giving. His mind is a testament to the potency of a consciousness that is inseparable from and aware of the living universe from which we have emerged and that is compelled by a natural impulse toward growth and evolution.

“Waste is food” is Braungart's motto. “We are the only species that makes unusable waste. So we are in the process of making this whole planet a big graveyard. Every other animal only makes things that are available for others as well. We need to learn from nature that nature only does things that cycle.” Rather than conceiving of enterprise as a linear system that mechanically moves from taking resources to making products to selling them to throwing them away, cradle-to-cradle thinking, Braungart tells me, “proposes to see everything as a nutrient—either as a technical nutrient that is reusable or as a biological nutrient.” Perhaps this is the “goo” that the next phase of human civilization will feed on: the disassembly and reinvention of the unusable products from the first industrial revolution to create new ones for the next.

Braungart observes that many young scientists want to create products that they can be proud of, and so they are designing in a way that is “far more evolutionary than everything that's been done before.” Braungart and these new industry activists are ingenious. “For example,” he says, “we designed an ice cream wrapper that degrades within hours because it becomes a liquid when you take it out of the freezer. But the nice thing is that it is not just biodegradable. That's the minimum. You see, many of us litter, throw away the ice cream wrapper, because it's a way to mark your territory, to show that you are important. But now, instead of trying to minimize our footprint, you can encourage a big footprint. Because the ice cream packaging contains seeds from rare plants, so that by throwing it away, you're supporting biodiversity like every songbird does.”

However, these activists within industry, like the butterfly's imaginal cells, are metaphorically being devoured by the profit-driven machine. Their new products and materials cannot get into the market, Braungart tells me. “There is a big blockade by the middle management,” he says, referring to those who are responsible for implementing the corporation's profit mandate. Bound by restrictive regulations in the United States and still driven by the profit motive, Western corporations go to countries like China and Malaysia in order to continue to produce “low-quality products much cheaper with lower environmental standards.” These products—for example, toys made out of “plasticizers” that give off sterility-causing gases when children chew on them—are real “weapons of mass destruction,” he says. Yet business of this kind continues because, as he puts it, “we have socialized the risk and we have privatized the profit, and that just doesn't make sense.” For change to happen, Braungart asserts, “we need industrial leaders who don't simply think in quarterly profits but who are really thinking about the longer term.” And they will need to “make a personal commitment to 'cradle-to-cradle' thinking.” It's clear that the system needs to change, and it will take courageous individuals to go against its momentum. Corporate leaders will need to risk liberating their own minds from mechanistic thinking.