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I generally can’t bring myself to write much about climate change any more, these days. It just seems pretty much hopeless. I don’t want to dwell on it (which is what I just said, I guess), but I basically see two big problems.

One: Preventing dangerous climate change has, for whatever reason, become as pure a “wedge” issue as any; the reactionaries are 100% set against anything of the sort. Which leaves… us. But liberals/Democrats and our causes seem to have hit our high water mark, with the White House, the House of Representatives and (at one point, allegedly) a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. And we still can’t seem to do much of anything. This is as good as it seems likely to get in the foreseeable future (which depresses me more deeply than I can really describe) and it seems very unlikely that any kind of adequate climate change legislation will be passed. Even if it were, the GOP would very likely swear up and down their determination to repeal it and, unlike health care reform, I think that would be a very real prospect.

Second, however much one feels that the United States and other first-world industrialized nations should bear the bulk of the responsibility for containing greenhouse warming—and I’m personally willing to go along with that argument fairly far—we simply can’t do it alone.

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I stumbled into a really interesting presentation recently on the intertrons while researching the idea of “Cradle to Cradle” design. Among other things, it takes issue with the idea of recycling, in its current form, which is really just slowing down the process of waste production as goods are “downcycled” into lower-quality products. Wending my way to the video below led me past something I’d seen before, the “Eco roof” at Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan Truck Plant. As you’ll see in the presentation, installing a 10-acre grass roof saved Ford nearly 40 million dollars in the construction of an equally effective water treatment plant. Perhaps a good intro is the following quote from the presentation, on why McDonough’s book is printed on a fully recyclable polymer that can be recycled into another book made of the same polymer.

as Margaret Atwood pointed out, “we write our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears.” And with so much polymer, what we really need is technical nutrition, and to use something as elegant as a tree — imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons and self-replicates. Well, why don’t we knock that down and write on it?

-William McDonough on why his book, Cradle to Cradle, isn’t printed on paper.