Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [120]
What’s the good of a fine house if you don’t have a tolerable planet to put it on?
–Henry David Thoreau
Sometimes when I see people doing amazing things, I feel pretty darn small and my efforts look virtually insignificant. But then I remember the starfish story. You’ve probably heard it.
A man is walking along a beach after a big storm. There are tens of thousands of starfish washed up and dying. In the distance, a small boy is picking them up and throwing them one by one back into the ocean. The man walks up to him and says, “What are you doing?” “Saving them,” replies the boy. “You’re crazy. There are thousands and thousands of them. You can’t possibly make a difference.” The boy was quiet for a moment then looked down, picked one up, and threw it in. “Made a difference to that one,” he said.
My clients are unusually well educated about the environment and do not yet represent the majority, but this segment of the population is growing as the building trend toward sustainable design expands. People want healthy, energy-efficient, durable, non-toxic buildings. They want to feel good about their choices.
One of my favorite quotes is from Winston Churchill: “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing … after they have tried everything else.” This can be applied to our building pattern. I am a bit of an optimist. I believe that America, and the world, has the energy, ability, and creativity to get ourselves out of the mess we have created. When I figure out how to get solar panels into a school for the same price as a conventional boiler, I feel a sense of accomplishment. When I sell a client on bamboo flooring and strawbale walls, I know I have saved part of a forest that day. When I show a developer how to make money and conserve land at the same time with a community-fostering cohousing site plan, I have enrolled someone in a better possibility. This inspires me.
I believe we create a better future by learning from our past and bringing back those elements that worked well, but we must also invent new ways of living to solve the problems that remain. McDonough’s innovative two-track approach to this issue is illuminating. He separates the built world into two groups: biological nutrients (natural things) and technical nutrients (man-made things). He argues that it makes sense to keep these two categories separate. That means that biological products like wood and paper should be recycled into other products of that type (wood into other wood products, for example), while man-made things like steel, glass, concrete, and plastic should be recycled into more steel, glass, etc. In McDonough’s definition, it is critical that recycling not mean “downgrading.” If trees become toilet paper and that becomes mixed landfill, the resource has been downgraded to a waste product and its value is destroyed. It has to stay in the cycle and preferably at a similar level to the original product. This is how we begin to contain our waste stream and resource consumption.
Former President Bush invited McDonough to the White House to advise his administration. Why? Perhaps because McDonough advocates the eventual elimination of all environmental regulations—okay, that’s a head-scratcher. His argument is that given a true free-market economy (one in which oil is not subsidized as it is now), the simple, green, non-toxic, and local will beat the pants off big-box imported junk. And that philosophy trickles down to