Seems like an stream of conciousness rambling, but maybe he was stung by a design ant.

huh?

The ghost of James Joyce called and he thinks that's some incoherrent rambling.

Humans produce nutrients too.

We just flush them down the toilet, and ultimately hope that the city's waste management system does a proper job with it.

thank you for wasting my brain cells. they could have been spent on reading comics.

I think I get what he's saying but he isn't being practical. We're not going to stop producing waste anytime soon because we don't have the "designs" as he says. However, we do have the "designs" for reducing people, and reducing consumption doesn't really require much redesign. So while it would be nice if we could be like ants and populate the planet with 30 billion non-waste, perfectly renewable humans.... it's just so much easier to use a condom.

I think he's trying to say that sustainability is boring, and humans are inherently creative, and if you emphasize sustainability, you alienate a lot of creative people.

I think that's what he's saying.

I can see that. Utopias are often numbingly static. Plus, you don't want to stifle innovation which might accelerate positive change.

interesting?

how can one go from writing such a logical and wonderful book like cradle to cradle.... to this?

I don't get the negative responses to a brilliant article. Maybe some people didn't read it carefully.

actually, I thought this quote would belong perfectly in the cradle to cradle book. He's consistent.

Sounds like he is just coming up with excuses to have a lot of kids - but would you want to be one of his kids or be his wife?

His comments are consistent with Cradle to Cradle. But his use of ants as a comparison to humans is not.

Ants thrive through collective intelligence, ensuring the success of the colony in a method that is much the same as it was when their time began. They also appear to enjoy eating the exact same thing (sugar) every single day.

Humans are individualistic and creative. We created waste and we can create ways to get rid of waste. However, we have problems getting all of us to do this together. And I don't think 30 billion of us would be happy eating only sugar all the time.

Well maybe the kids would.

If you strongly identify with the term "sustainable" and that ideology, I can understand why you didn't appreciate him calling sustainability boring. I agree with the last two commenters. This is totally consistent with C2C and it is brilliant. Although Braungart's article felt like rant and not very coherent, his central idea is terribly powerful. Sustainabilty just means conservation. At that rate we will just prolong our problems. I would like to be part of forum where people are can challenge any idea or ideology once those ideas are understood thoroughly.

Yes, the negative comments are hard to understand. It's really quite simple, humans are insanely wasteful. Killing ourselves actually. It's really very sad.Perhaps this is why so many commenters don't get it.

The things we need to do are so far from what we are doing that it's hard to comprehend. It's not enough to drive a Prius to save the planet. You need to buy a bike instead of the Prius, grow your own food, and turn off the AC. These things would be a good starting point to buy so time.......

if you believe in depopulation then please take action and jump off a bridge

It is hard to interpret what he is saying, but I can see where his statement is coming from.

Like in Japan, the law for building architectual stuff is very strict and because of that, it is not practical and opposite of the idea of the sustainablity: for example, green roof, compost-toilet, and so on.

I think what he is saying is that politics, society, or lasy ass corporations may exploit the freedom of building a creative building by using the word "sustainablility".

I think that is very scary.

I agree. There are not too many people, until we have so many that we cannot feed them. We currently produce enough food for ten billion, which is more than the UN predicts we will ever reach.

A world with ten billion people has ten times the creativity, innovation, love, joy, and wonder as a world with one billion. There is no reason we should target anything less than the maximum number that can be sustained, which is ultimately limited by space to grow food.

The man talks about two types of sustainability which would normally be used in different contexts, pretty nonsensical and off topic.

Actually this is quite a brilliant statement. With enough water and sunlight grass is sustainable. Who wants that life? You have to factor in human nature and human ambition to come up with significant ideas about environmentally responsive ways of living.

Not too many people, eh? Well hell! Let's just keep squeezing them on this here rock we got until there are!

What about the reports I've been seeing for years that have been telling me we're in overshoot of the Earth's carrying capacity for humans by 20-30%? The one(s) that immediately come to mind are those by GFN.

Consumption is certainly a part of the equation, but to ignore population or to even say it's less of an issue and that it's really consumption that needs to be addressed, is intellectually dishonest.

John Feeney (great guy, from what I can tell, an an excellent deep ecology writer) covers this quite well: An unholy matrimony and Population and consumption: both major players. And of course as far as any growth is concerned, please refer to Al Barlett.

He sounds like GM and Ford did when they both laughed long and hard at Toyota's hybrid approach which was quite concerned with the sustainability of oil consumption.

lolz

Uh, Ogemaniac, you're a little daft, eh?

The idea that theoretically we can grow enough food for 10 billion humans is a thought experiment, not real world you dope.

Here, let me clue you in:

Supposedly we can create enough food to fulfil the minimum average number of food calories that 10 billion humans would need. That is, if there was no food waste or losses from dirt to belly.

Right now, the current demands for food calories and energy calories by the current 6.8 billion far exceeds the world's production capacity. PERIOD.

Oh sure, there’s nothing that’ll cure boredom quicker than finding yourself stuck on a planet that’s in the process of turning into a furnace and the only thing you can do about it is to bore into the ground and wait for starvation to cure all your problems.

We’re not ants. We’re not even close and sustainability is supposed to be boring. That allows us the freedom to do more exciting things like jumping off of tall buildings with our parachutes or learning about how our universe works. That’s were the excitement should be.

We determine how many of us should be on this planet by establishing a minimally acceptable quality of life for those of us here, Ants have no quality of life, and they’re merely here to make us humans miserable by stinging us. What good is an ant, really?

he's saying:

no use cutting back. we're creative (and destructive).

why not just allow us to flourish in our creativity but in such a way that there is no waste?

it makes perfect sense to me. people are too quick to judge.

Actually, what he said is brilliant. If someone read the book, Cradle-to-Cradle, they would understand his philosphy is that every single item of waste should be designed to be food for something else in the system. In the book, he gives the example of ants as part of the eco-system, and everything they use and create--from their chemical warfare (venom) to their biological waste (poop and dead bodies) feeds back into the cycle of nature.

What he is calling for is that we try to re-think everything so our byproducts fit back into the cycle of nature (life, whatever word you want to use).

Braungart's statements i think leave out some major parts of the equation. Ants are in perfect balance with their surroundings, they eat and get eaten everything they do and are is reused. I know he is trying to say we should be that way but the only way to get there would be to go back to caveman days, because as long as mining, logging, farming are required we are not in balance with nature.

"A world with ten billion people has ten times the creativity, innovation, love, joy, and wonder as a world with one billion. There is no reason we should target anything less than the maximum number that can be sustained, which is ultimately limited by space to grow food."

I would beg to differ on the 10 million would have all the same wonder, Human's tend to require a certain amount of room on earth that they tend to not want to share with other animals. It is already very clear to everyone that many animals are in the process of going extinct or are sadly already there. How can there be innovation, wonder, joy when the world has been homogenized and bastardized from its original design from overpopulation? I take no joy in the fact that humans are displacing every other living thing on this planet at 6 billion. again i raise the argument unless we revert to caveman days to regain "balance" there is no way the earth can support more humans. By balance i mean we allow ourselves to be part of the food chain and not control our surroundings and sterilize them.

The above is not going to happen, if we want to live our lives with technology, there is going to be an impact, if we continue to sterilize our surroundings allowing only certain species to live with us there is going to be an impact. The only way to reduce this impact is for there to be less of us. More humans will never be an answer to achieving the goals the stated goals

Yes sustainability is boring. Boring because there is no life or death drama over our toxicity destroying the planet.

Many things are boring, and when they get not boring it is very upsetting or even fatal. Good health is boring, and struggling to survive is exciting, but it is not a good way to live because it does not promote intelligent decision making.

For every population level there is a sustainable lifestyle, but when the world gets to be 12 billion people, that lifestyle is living in a cubbyhole and eating our wastes recycled directly into fungus.

How large a population is not the question, what kind of lifestyle do we want to have is.

We are too many, human can't live in the density of ants.

i dont mean to change the subject here but i must say that : for those who doubt that we are already soooo overpopulated maybe you should try living in a 20 million , 3rd world city and maybe then you could experience first hand all the problems related to overcrowding . Because it isnt just pollution it is also extreme violence , rape , kidnap , invasion of your personal space , uglyness and the worst aspects of human "nature", it`s just so overwhelming and terrible .
But as i said before you have to actually experience it to really know what im talkin about . When living in a nice 1st world suburb or in the country you just cant see it .

Humans always take the easy way out.

We need to change the way we think and the way we do things. Think more carefully about the effect we are having on the environment.