If designers are to lead, then they need to be equipped with the information and tools necessary to create a more sustainable world. And if leaders are to accept their designing role, they must ask questions that go beyond the prosaic in every field. They must question fundamental material and process choices, and encourage all members of companies and communities to work within a revised ethical framework, a framework that respects our evolving understanding of the laws of nature.
The goals and strategies outlined in the body of this piece cannot be achieved unless we engage in a creative process that pays close attention to the needs of all people. Despite the attention and involvement that environmentalism has drawn, most people do not feel they are meaningfully involved in the designing and construction of economic and environmental solutions to everyday problems. The only design process that can succeed is one based on unconditional respect for everyone. To achieve broad-based participation in a system of commerce designed to sustain the environment, the following objectives should be kept in mind:
It should provide secure, stable, and meaningful employment for people everywhere. There can be no sustainable world without satisfying and remunerative employment. Self-administered or wholesale reductions of consumption in industrial countries without a broad-based and workable employment strategy will result in the same random despoilation occasioned by the marginalized poor in the third world.
It should be self-actuating as opposed to regulated or mandated, honoring human nature and market principles. There are those who sincerely believe that the rate at which we are losing life on earth calls for the imposition of laws that protect the environment at the expense of individual freedom. Granting them their argument, which in effect puts aside certain human liberties for a greater good, the premise is flawed when you look at it from a design point of view. Although government has a critical role to play, its role must coincide with the natural impulses of society. Human beings want to flourish and prosper, to live in security and better themselves. If a system of conservation is misunderstood or blocks or interferes with those aspirations, it will ultimately be rejected.
The human condition has been discussed and debated for centuries by theologians, poets, politicians, and philosophers. If we can be sure of anything, it is that our essential nature changes slowly and mysteriously, and no "plan" to reverse environmental degradation can be effected within a reasonable time frame if it requires a wholesale change in human behavior. In other words, we have to work with what we have, hoping for deep, historic changes but not relying on them. Furthermore, the basic human instinct to shop the market and buy products of comparable quality that are the lowest price is firmly embedded. We have to respect and use that impulse rather than ask people to pay more for "saving the planet." They won't do it in many cases, and in most cases, they can't.
It should exceed sustainability by restoring degraded habitats and ecosystems to their fullest biological capacity. The dirty little secret in environmentalism is that there is no such thing as sustainability. In overall terms, habitats and ecosystems can endure over millennia, to be sure. But in terms of specific fisheries, tracts of land, and forested areas, calculating sustainability is like solving Xeno's paradox. Furthermore, we have probably passed the point where our planet's resources can be relied on to support the number of people expected to live on it within the next 40 years. Thus, any viable economic program must turn back the resource clock and reverse degradation by actively restoring damaged and deteriorating ecosystems. This restoration is far more compelling than the algebra of sustainability because we create rather than merely measure.
It should be creative and engaging, and be perceived as more rewarding than our present way of life. Government, business, and environmental organizations cannot create a sustainable society. It will come about in the minutiae of daily acts willingly engaged in by billions of eager participants. Redesigning our world has to uphold ideas, visions, and goals that people want to achieve. In other words, we have to uphold the image of a future world we will live in that is intriguing, nonthreatening to the vast majority, and wonderfully inviting because people can participate in, enjoy, and create it.
There are those who think that human beings are predatory by nature. But we cast our vote with those who feel that human beings take on the shape of their culture and that shifts in culture and how we express our nature can occur in rare moments with remarkable speed and vigor. One conventional view is that human beings are rushing pell-mell to an environmental hell. An alternative view is that our highest instincts and aspirations are being suppressed by the unintentional but worldwide imposition of a system whose usefulness is utterly negated by our numbers and the world condition. In other words, good design releases humankind from its neurotic relationship to the meaningless and absurd work of destruction and allows us to head toward a destiny that is far more "realistic" and enduring than the commercial system we have today. The urge to create beauty, sanctity, and goodness is the untapped power that needs to be released, and it is as present in commerce as anywhere else.
