Response to Cradle to Cradle

I am very much enjoying this book. I think what I like best about it is that it's not just an argument, it's also a method. It's not just about a new approach (one that is similar to others we've read), but it's about exactly what the approach looks like. The approach looks like a building full of windows where solar income is maximized, it looks like textiles made of materials that can decompose without leaving behind harmful substances. It looks like ink without the toxins and paper without the tree. That's what's so optimistic to me about this book. It gives me concrete examples of the technology that is already out there to make everything we produce and consume not "less harmful" to the environment, but part of nature and therefore, NOT harmful to the environment. It's not just talk, it's action. Before reading this book, I felt like I could argue all I wanted for changing the system, making things differently from their conception, but if anyone asked me what that meant or how that looked, I would be at a loss. So although this book doesn't address what I consider to be serious problems of consumerism, affluence, and population growth, it does give me solid evidence for what the world should look like if everything we made was made to fit into the natural world; a world where environmental doomsday no longer lingers. To know that there is that technology out there is a huge step in the right direction in my mind and I was happy to hear about it.