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In these photos, you can see a forest ecosystem that has experienced fire and which is now entering its next stage of growth. The fire was no disaster here; that's a drama created by the corporate media. i won't even describe it as death followed by life. That metaphor suggests an ending and a beginning, and the cycles of a forest ecosystem are not as linear or discrete as that; rather, a multitude of cycles constantly ebb and flow in overlaps of first this thing and then that entering one stage or another. At no single point is there complete death. Instead, life simply fills different shapes from one moment to the next. Our perception, blindered by a setting called "civilzation" that is poisonous, mediated and constricted, fails to recognize this reality. Destroying these places is a crime. Waking ourselves up and doing something to stop it is the only morally defensible choice to make.
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Our present production systems is barbarious just because we have not taken stock of our design opportunities. The eco-effient designers would ask "how can we use twice, four times even ten times less trees to make our boxes and paper?" The eco-effective designers are asking "why are we making boxes and paper out of precious trees of the world when we have a polymer chemistry that is so elegant.
From a business perspective if boxes and paper were made of healthy infinitely up-cyclable polymers that would be no waste management costs, no extraction costs, no toxic emission costs for regulation, no regulation paperwork costs. Plus everytime the polymers came back to the industries for up-cycling revenue is created.
This is Cradle to Cradle Design, actually the 2002 book "Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Making Things" is the first polymer book called a technical nutrient. This book is not a tree.
Online 2003 lecture
NPR 2002 audio