Book Review: The Upcycle, beyond sustainability - designing for abundance

This marvelous book is your inspiration and your guide for changing how you think about environmental sustainability.

Michael Braungart's and William McDonough's follow-on to Cradle to Cradle reflects how two powerful minds have grown in their work and their understanding...and we all benefit.

I am listing here three important take-aways for museums, zoos, gardens, aquariums and sites, but please treat yourself to the full read: smart thinking, positive approaches, and valuable language for describing what we're doing and how to live green and prosper.

• This work has "no endgame". That means that, instead of finishing your checklist, you continuously improve. I believe that checklists provide a valuable framework for getting started and learning but, after some experience making green choices, you can graduate to project metrics and institutional values that accelerate change and involve everyone around you. "No endgame" also encourages you to focus less on reducing negative impact and more on creating positive solutions for the planet and your life and work - it adds whole dimensions.  

• "Starting with a metric blinds planners to the larger effect of ones actions". A values-based plan allows for more expansive thinking and options. A simplistic example: focusing only on energy use reduction closes the door to renewables; you will get better results pursuing a value: the most appropriate collections care with the least fossil fuel use possible at this time. Values encourage holistic approaches that might include microclimates, buffering, reorganization, energy efficiency and labor savings, renewable energy and co-generation. Metrics are critical features, but they are only part of the picture. Your goal is to mature in this work until you can start from a bigger place.

• Strive for "additionality: more of a good thing". With the collections care example, if "the good thing" is quality collections care, let's have more of it. Remember when visible storage became a "thing"? Museums began to use quality storage as a visible display and increased public access. That's additionality. Let's say your city now requires you to manage all your stormwater onsite. You can do that with cisterns for water reuse, and catchment ponds and rain gardens to retain water as it percolates into the soil. The good thing is reducing flow (with dirt, oil, leaves, etc.) into surface water sources or treatment plants, and reducing the chances of treatment plant overflows that send waste and surface water straight to rivers and oceans. The additionality is water available for reuse to flush toilets or to water plantings, and gardens that contribute to the quality of open space for viewing, programs, or events, and to habitat for bees and birds. "Additionality" supports my mantra that good green work always "does more than one thing". Synergy can take you a long way. 

We all need encouragement as we keep on with the good hard work. The Upcycle gives a good dose, and helps shift us all to a positive outlook of abundance, opportunity, hope and success.

Good Words for Sustainability Work I

Reinforcements: Notes and stickies keep helpful quotes at the ready.

It can be frustrating, some days, working to spread environmentally-sustainable behavior and thinking. Practitioners often feel alone, unsupported, discouraged. Not always; but often.

Once in awhile I come across an explanation that clarifies my thinking, or a quote that encourages me, or a statement that I can use to help others see the importance, too. These quotes or comments from others remind me I am not alone, and they improve my thinking about this work.

I capture them on stickies and put them on the walls of my office, or I keep them as notes from conference sessions, or from reading or research. More always come to displace them, so before I recycle these, I'll write the quotes and my notes here for me and for you:

Metrics are the darlings of improving efficiency and reducing impact, but sometimes starting with concepts (missions), rather than numbers, can create greater change:
              "Starting with a metric blinds planners to the larger effect of one's actions in a way that a values-based plan does not."  (McDonough and Braungart in The Upcycle, 2013, p100.)

Green work is serious creative thinking. We are looking for new ways to solve long-standing problems, and doing it with multiple positive results. That new thinking makes it creative.That complexity makes it hard.  This helps me accept the difficulty of the work:
             "It's about understanding how complicated the modern business world is, how indispensable diversity of perspective is, and how hard creative work is. Here's why it's hard: because often there is no right answer." (Brian Grayer, Fast Company, April 2015)

The window for reversing climate change is closed; the one for slowing it is closing rapidly. If we're going to make any difference, we have to make changes, huge ones, and at speeds most people just are not comprehending. This succinct phrase says it best:
              "The yardstick for action is dangerously short-sighted".  (George Adamson, NOVA Special on "Elsa", 12.17.2014)