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A review by pldean
The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability--Designing for Abundance by William McDonough
4.0
The thesis of "The Upcycle" is that...well, here's a quote: "Abundance -- of us, of our products -- is not the scourge: Society can accommodate and encourage even hundreds of thousands of products, from thousands of cultures, and even honor every one of the 10 billion people predicted to be here later in the century."
McDonough and Braungart posit that the idea of lowering one's carbon footprint is a bit too negative, too pessimistic. Instead, humans should seek to add sustainable abundance through intelligent and sustainable use of resources. Just as billions or trillions of ants, for example, exist on earth by contributing to its natural fecundity, so can humans, as when we compost and create fertile soil where none existed, add to the positive environment of earth.
It's a seductive line of thought, especially if you've ever had the sneaking suspicion that the best thing you can do for the environment is, well, die.
But it also gives me pause, and I would love for someone more biologically-trained to take up this question: don't even animal species exceed carrying capacity and endure cataclysmic population crashes? Isn't there finally a limit to what humans, even the most up-cycling, biomass-enhancing, value-adding humans, can do to forestall that fate? Isn't the natural world, with its complete and self-restoring systems, of limited use, finally, as a parallel to the world we have created?
Man, I'd love to see what Bill McKibben would say about this book.
McDonough and Braungart posit that the idea of lowering one's carbon footprint is a bit too negative, too pessimistic. Instead, humans should seek to add sustainable abundance through intelligent and sustainable use of resources. Just as billions or trillions of ants, for example, exist on earth by contributing to its natural fecundity, so can humans, as when we compost and create fertile soil where none existed, add to the positive environment of earth.
It's a seductive line of thought, especially if you've ever had the sneaking suspicion that the best thing you can do for the environment is, well, die.
But it also gives me pause, and I would love for someone more biologically-trained to take up this question: don't even animal species exceed carrying capacity and endure cataclysmic population crashes? Isn't there finally a limit to what humans, even the most up-cycling, biomass-enhancing, value-adding humans, can do to forestall that fate? Isn't the natural world, with its complete and self-restoring systems, of limited use, finally, as a parallel to the world we have created?
Man, I'd love to see what Bill McKibben would say about this book.