As a child, I spent many hours tinkering in
my father’s workshop and the way I often tell
what a student or a person’s vocation might be
is what they do in their spare time.
And in my spare time I spend a lot of time
building things from wood and metal.
It began with small things, I built my sister a
sewing machine out of wood, it didn’t work
but it had all these components and so on.
I progressed into mini-bikes and go-carts and
had this insatiable desire to create and build.
When I approached college age
and was asked what I would study
I said I wanted to be an inventor.
Most people told me to pursue
mechanical engineering, which is a
common avenue for inventors.
Engineering was a little too technical for me,
a little too stifling.
I wanted something more creative.
I found industrial design, which is a
fantastic mixture of art and technology,
of poetry and science.
There essentially needs to be a new
relationship between commerce and nature.
The way we’ve done things in the past
just aren’t working; we’re consuming more
than we’re replenishing.
The resources that the Earth has to offer,
such as water and air, etcetera, are diminishing
quickly and not being restored at a fast enough
rate to make this earth sustainable.
The Earth is also a living system and in that
system there are cycles and we need to figure
out how to plug our technical and business
world into those natural cycles so that we can
live harmoniously with the Earth.
There’s also a concept that I think is
very important in sustainability and that
is the concept of waste equals food.
In nature, a tree will grow and it will
disperse nuts and leaves will fall off,
eventually the tree will die.
But all those materials, the nuts, for example,
serve as food for animals in that ecosystem,
the leaves act as mulch for the soil
and eventually the tree, as it composts,
will again add nutrients for other living things
to grow in that spot.
We have long lived with the philosophy of
‘cradle to grave.’
What that means is when we design or
create products for mass consumption
they usually end with the death of the product,
which sometimes is landfilled,
sometimes incinerated.
We need to rethink that to a cradle to cradle
system wherein a product,
after it’s useful life is over, can continue
again, either through recycling or through
biological composting; but, again, become
nutrients for the next wave of products.
I’d also like to talk about growth.
In nature, growth is good and in our
technical and business world growth
can be good as well, but the question is
what do we want to grow:
Do we want to grow sickness,
or do we want to grow health?
Do we want to grow prosperity or poverty?
So, it’s a question of what we want to grow
and how we grow it that will make
a big difference in keeping in tune with
nature’s cyclical systems.
Absolutely, I’ll give you an example.
In science, for example, bio-mimicry is
exploding and essentially bio-mimicry is
innovation inspired by nature.
Spiders, they essentially can weave
a waterproof fiber that’s 5 times
stronger than steel.
A leaf can take the sun’s energy
and convert that energy into fuel
in a trillionth of a second.
When we look at what animals do
or what they eat when they’re sick,
we can learn a lot about new medicines.