Book Review: Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

Written on 11/12 at 02:46 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

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Book Review: Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart

Cradle to Cradle is one of those book that changes you.  In other words, it is not a book that merely informs the reader.  It is a book that precipitates a paradigm shift in how one things about ecology, design, economics, business and human relations.  It is a book that seeks to change the very nature of how we do business and how we interact.  It is a model for a new type of industrial revolution as well as a philosophical argument against nature as a tool of man and for man as being a tool of nature.  What does that mean in practical terms?  It means that we design buildings that clean the air, purify the water and produce more energy than the use, because then we are providing things to nature rather than simply taking things away from her and then converting those things into products that cannot be returned to nature because they are now toxic and often do not biodegrade.  Thus the authors argue that products should either be able to return to the biological cycle (basically, soil and water) and safely biodegrade, or to the technical cycle to be infinitely recycled. 

The best example of this is the book itself.  When you pick it up it has a pleasant sheen to it, a certain crispness that is nice to hold and nice to look at.  But it isn’t made from a tree.  Rather, it is made from plastic polymers and inorganic fillers which not only make the book waterproof and highly durable, they also mean that when the book’s useful life ends it can be sent back to the manufacturer to be safely remade into a new book!  In fact, the first chapter is called “This Book Is Not A Tree.” Why is it not a tree?  Why not just use paper?  Because, they argue, trees are far too precious resources to be used for writing down our ideas.  The services trees render to us and other species is far greater than the benefit gained from cutting them down and writing on them.  Furthermore, the plastic paper that they use is safe and infinitely recyclable, and in addition it is highly durable, pleasant and waterproof (you can read the book in the tub or at the beach without any worries!).

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Movie Review: Into The Wild

Written on 10/27 at 10:24 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

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"The majority of men lead lives of quiet desperation."–Henry David Thoreau Into the Wild is not for those that have never aspired to greatness. To them, Christopher McCandless, the subject of the book and movie by the same name, is at best naive and misguided and at worst cruel and fanatical. But anyone that has longed to cut ties to the world and its explore its vastness knows that when Chris, after graduating with honors from Emory University, gave away all his money, burned his social security card and, without informing anyone of his whereabouts, began driving west, his actions were not merely a symptom of youthful insouciance. There is a tremendous history of intrepid souls, from the earliest mythological figures, to Christ and Buddha and countless saints and sages from all parts of the earth, that have felt the need to step out of themselves and venture into the the wild. The question of whether Chris was a saint or hurt young man running from family problems has been in the minds of many that read Jon Krakauer's 1997 book about his 2 year, 2 month long odyssey that ended with his death in Alaska. The movie makes it clear: yes, there was pain from which he was fleeing, but there were also profound experiences and truths that he was seeking. To deny one or the other is to deny the truth: no great man is motivated purely by greatness, and what is most fascinating about Into the Wild is the view it affords us into the mind of an uncommon individual.

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What It Is Really About

Written on 10/25 at 10:25 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

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I'm very quickly learning what my graduate program is really about. It turns out that what goes on in my classes pales in comparison to the importance of what I do at conferences, parties and meetings. Not that my classes aren't important and interesting, but so much of what I learn in my classes I could just as easily learn by reading on my own or on-the-fly in the context of a job. What I'm really here to do is to learn two things: how to network, and, more importantly, how to make things happen. The latter is critical. For so long I have filled my head with great ideas for projects, but always with a sense of frustration because I had no idea how to make those projects come to fruition.

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The ESA Project

Written on 10/21 at 10:28 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

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I want to discuss my semestre-long graduate seminar project. Several weeks ago our class of nine divided into three groups of three, each assigned to a different project related to the broad theme of carbon neutrality. I was assigned to the Ecological Society of America (ESA) group. Our job is to look at the carbon emissions resulting from the ESA's yearly operations, find ways to reduce those emissions and then suggest methods of offsetting the rest. We already know that the primary source of carbon emissions is the group's annual conference, held in early August, to which about 4,000 people fly, drive or take the train.

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Why Build Green?

Written on 09/30 at 10:31 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

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I wrote this essay for my Sustainable Design in the Built Environment Class. In it, I pretend to be an architect writing a letter to a potential client, explaining to him how green building works and why he or she should choose me, a green architectA letter to John Mench Schnook"Here are my rules: what can be done with one substance must never be done with another. No two materials are alike. No two sites on earth are alike. No two buildings have the same purpose. The purpose, the site, the material determine the shape.

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Green Microfinance: Advancing Social Equality and Environmental Sustainability in the United States

Click here to download a PDF of my complete thesis. Questions and comments are much appreciated!

My masters thesis in Environmental Studies at Brown University looks at how microfinance--the provision of small…

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A Solution to the Limited Success of Micro-Credit in the United States?

Micro-credit has undoubtedly been a runaway success in developing countries as a tool of both poverty alleviation and economic development.  To date, some 100 million people have been reached by micro-loans, and Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank…

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Tonight, the Oneness of Things

It is late and my mind should be drifting through the colorful abyss of deep sleep, yet instead i find that tonight sleep will not come.  I am like a hungry flower who dreams of bees so ardently that all…

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