Prophets, Gurus, and Pundits: Rhetorical Styles and Public Engagement

4. Sustainer Style: William McDonough

77 4 sustainer stYle: williaM MCdonouGh sustainability has a “religious” following. Though likely coined by The Ecologist in the early 1970s, the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in 1987 takes credit for introducing the term sustainability. The WCED defines sustainability as “the viability of natural resources and ecosystems over time, and the maintenance of human living standards and development” (1987, p. 43). Sustainability is associated largely with the environmental movement and, more specific, to green building and design. However, as the WCED definition overtly states, sustainability also involves creating and maintaining responsible and altruistic social and political systems. We can understand sustainability as a long-term commitment to the health of environmental, political, and social systems such that these systems can sustain themselves over time in a prosocial manner. In turn, the people who practice sustainability are what I call Sustainers. Regardless of its origin and scope, sustainability has gone “sexy,” according to the August 2006, edition of Dwell magazine, which, I suppose, makes one of the world’s foremost green designers, William McDonough, the sexiest man on our green and blue planet. Sustainers are so public they become “local” to the community and to the case, trying never to take what they cannot add back, innovating resources for communities and for the earth. WIllIAm mcdonough: It’s not eAsy beIng green William McDonough is a world-renowned architect and designer who since he began practicing as an architect in the late 1970s has been at the forefront of eco-efficient, green, or sustainable design and living. In fact, 78 sustAIner style McDonough built the first solar-heated house in Ireland in 1977 while still a student at Yale University and the first so-called green office for the Environmental Defense Fund in the United States in 1985. He has founded two design firms, William McDonough + Partners, Architecture and Community Design, and McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. His sustainable philosophy is at work in a number of places around the world from the United States to China and back again, including Maui Land and Pineapple, Fuller Theological Seminary, Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, IBM, and Nike. Several characteristics are central to Sustainer style, in general. Like prophetic rhetoric, the public intellectual Sustainer style relies first on a scathing indictment of current practices and the effects of those practices . Sustainers are also creative visionaries—rather than viewing sociopolitical or environmental problems as things to be tweaked until they are less bad, Sustainers work to invent new products and processes such that they eradicate the problems entirely. Ultimately, all in this and subsequent chapters, Sustainers are designers whether by profession or by style. I focus on the Sustainer here because he or she is one type of visionary working to sustain particular environments physiologically, psychologically, and sociologically. William McDonough and his partner, Michael Braungart, a chemist, write in their acclaimed book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, “Loss of resources, cultural depletion, negative social and environmental effects, reduction of quality of life—these ills can all be taking place, an entire region can be in decline, yet they are negated by a simplistic economic figure that says economic life is good” (2002, p. 37). McDonough and Braungart even recast something as seemingly positive and socially responsible as recycling as simply the lesser of evils—instead of creating and using products or systems that are infinitely sustainable, recycling results in “downcycling” (2002, p. 4), or the reduction of the product or service to an unusable and even dangerous form. Industry takes the brunt of The Sustainer’s environmental and social wrath. The authors note that although the reduction of waste emissions is an important goal for industry, “even tiny amounts of dangerous emissions can have disastrous effects on biological systems” (2002, p. 54). Of course, this destruction of natural and human environments is hardly a new phenomenon. Rather, McDonough and Braungart point to the West’s Industrial Revolution as the harbinger of much of our misguided thinking and practices as they relate to eco- and sociosystems. The Industrial Revolution has spawned a system of production that sustAIner style 79 puts billions of pounds of toxic material into the air, water and soil each year; puts valuable materials in holes all over the planet, where they can never be retrieved; measures productivity by how few people are working; and erodes the diversity of species and cultural...