[p2p-research] devastating story on cradle to cradle founder

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Kevin Carson wrote:
> On 7/21/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/130/the-mortal-messiah.html?page=0%2C0
>>
>> This is also a very interesting story to cover for our blog, as it shows how
>> the proprietary approach has made the project of cradle to cradle production
>> fail,
> 
> "...the architect said, 'I want to be the Bill Gates of
> sustainability,' and [that] he wants to make a royalty off of every
> green standard and every green product out there."
> 
> This just about floored me, because the vibe I'd been picking up from
> the whole article was "Bill Gates."
> 
> The technologies that save the world will be those that ordinary
> people can adopt for themselves at low cost, without paying royalties
> to some greenwashed billionaire.

This seems like an essential part of the article:
   "Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough "
   http://www.fastcompany.com/node/1042475/print
"""
For those who came to know McDonough from within the environmental and 
design movements -- those whose labors rarely reach the ears of Laurie David 
-- an alternative narrative exists about him. Until now, it has been 
shielded from the mainstream for two reasons: First, McDonough has done more 
than most to popularize the very idea of cleaning up the world, and for 
that, even his detractors agree he deserves thanks; second, if word gets out 
that he may not be all that he appears, the overall cause of sustainability 
could suffer. "He's been incredibly important and valuable in this role as 
visionary," says Auden Schendler, executive director of sustainability at 
Aspen Skiing Co. "The problem is that sometimes the theorists like McDonough 
will represent themselves as practitioners, and that's where the guys in the 
trenches get frustrated."
"""

And also this:
"""
McDonough desperately needs to break the logjam that has stalled him. Just 
as the global fixation on sustainability is exploding, McDonough's design 
revolution is paralyzed -- and he is the paralyzing agent, unable to 
capitalize on his brilliant, crucial idea, but unwilling to set it free. 
Last year, Environmental Building News deemed McDonough's cradle-to-cradle 
certification a "black box": "You can see what's going in and what's going 
out, but you're not privy to exactly what's going on inside the process," 
says Nadav Malin, the trade journal's editor. In truth, among MBDC's 160 
certifications, virtually the only consumer brands are the U.S. Postal 
Service and Kiehl's -- the latter of which Brad Pitt helped push through as 
a charity product for his foundation. Critics argue that McDonough's work is 
not transparent or consensus based, and that because he sometimes consults 
for companies whose products he's also certifying, the whole endeavor is 
conflicted, if not unethical. "All the money stays in one place," says Tim 
Cole, director of environmental initiatives and product development at Forbo 
Flooring, and treasurer of the USGBC. The impression that emerges, says 
Cole, is, " 'Hey, if you want your product certified cradle to cradle, just 
go to McDonough, pay your price, and it will happen.' I think cradle to 
cradle will either have to get better or become a thing of the past. You 
have to evolve with the movement." McDonough is trying. His latest strategy 
involves, once again, opening up the work to the public -- this time to 
develop MBDC's materials database Wiki-style.
"""

Because I was involved with organic food certification in the 1980s, I can 
see the value of certification in general, and know it can be done 
reasonable ethically (though in theory there could in theory remain issues 
with cosy boards made up of farmers certifying each other, though that is 
not what I saw in practice). I've long thought, for example, one could apply 
the certification idea to free and open source software in some way (people 
demonstrating a knowledge of copyright issue to get certified as producing 
stuff likely to be uncontaminated by proprietary stuff). I like the idea of 
applying certification to manufactured goods. So, I like that aspect of 
cradle-to-cradle whatever else one could say about who gets any profits from 
certification (in practice, if done by a non-profit, these certification 
processes may be run at just about cost with little profit).

It seems like there are at least two big failure modes in being an activist, 
neither of which is either to avoid in a new area a long time before it 
becomes mainstream.

One failure mode is outlined here for William McDonough and relates to the 
celebrity worshiping winner-take-all economic culture we have constructed 
for ourselves. It is where you try so hard to push an idea, yet you still 
need money for living expenses, that, in a quest for right livelihood, your 
public persona becomes the idea and your finances become the idea. People 
often like to be around celebrities, and when you become one in the process 
of promoting an idea, it gets hard to put in lots of footnotes as to sources 
in everything you say (even if you may start out wanting to and doing so). 
And as you get your presentations down, and as the ideas become more of 
yourself, the roots may fade away, maybe even to the point where you believe 
in the originality of it all yourself. And if you are the kind of person 
good at taking ideas and making them your own and presenting them in 
innovative ways, and so on, chances are you are not a "scholar" to begin 
with (with frequent footnotes, cautious pronouncements, careful caveats, 
etc.). Part of the failure mode is that you may start to annoy everyone 
whose work you build on, people who also would also like a bit of the 
limelight (and the funding,  give the lack of a basic income), and you may 
come to believe your own hype. This is the rock star failure mode. Another 
aspect is over confidence (the New Yorker just had an essay about that and 
financial markets and Bear Sterns, given appearing optimistic leads to more 
support.) There is another aspect, too. You can see it in music too as well 
as visual arts -- people just making more of the same that pays and then 
burning out from boredom and fear of taking risks and seeming foolish 
(including wanting to hide failures). Once people have been heavily rewarded 
for doing one thing, it can be hard to go back to joyful roots and 
experimentation including documenting failures (since most experiments will 
be failures, being tolerant of failure is an important aspect of being a 
researcher, something Hans Moravec has said). Bucky Fuller had aspects of 
this rock star failure mode too (for example, the issue of who invented the 
tensegrity idea), although he also made genuine contributions in his own 
way. Nicholas Negroponte and the OLPC project suffered some of this too.

But there is an opposite failure mode (one I'm more enmeshed in myself. :-) 
That is the one that leads to cynicism and inaction and pessimism and 
focusing more on some minor aspect of infrastructure (or even wishful 
thinking) than getting out a message in an effective way. Also, as the years 
go by, you can become bitter and twisted and defensive as a person, having 
fought one emotional and intellectual battle after another, until everything 
is a conflict, everything is an assumed failure, every person is assumed to 
be unsympathetic, which of course also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, 
because who wants to hang out with bitter or timid or critical people. It's 
also a sort of "learned helplessness" like Martin Seligman studied,
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness
where for example, an experimenter shocks a dog every time it tries to walk 
over part of a floor towards its food dish, and pretty soon the dog curls up 
in a corner and stops trying to get across the floor even as it starves. 
Even after the experimenter drags the dog across the floor to the food, the 
dog remains dysfunctional. For me, after about twenty years of being 
interested in a sustainable design system, but being at places where it was 
of little interest (I tried to get a PhD related to it at four different 
universities in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as start a related 
business),
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/princeton-graduate-school-plans.html
and not having the talents or experiences or connections or interests or 
starting capital or willingness to focus (or compromise) that William 
McDonough had, I'm more in the second category, the hungry dog that won't go 
over to the food dish that it is staring at. :-)

These of course are exaggerations; real people, with real lives, and real 
families, of course are more complicated than prototypical rock stars or 
helpless starving dogs. All people have strengths and weaknesses, and there 
are even situations where weaknesses become strengths, and strengths can 
become weaknesses. :-) But there is still an element of truth to both 
extremes as risks for any activist.

So, it's very heartening to see the people posting to the p2presearch list 
or the open manufacturing list or many other places, people who may be more 
new to these ideas, but who see them differently -- as stuff that is 
happening now, but without the baggage of either having made a living off of 
them for a decade or two, or *not* having made a living off of them for a 
decade or two. :-) A new generation shows up with the same hope and 
enthusiasm and openness that William and I started out with, but I can still 
hope more comes from it now in a global and open way. That article is 
hopeful about these ideas as a movement, mentioning someone who "knows more 
than 100 sustainability executives".

And as I said about my overly ambitious graduate school plans: "The good 
news is that now, twenty years later, all or most of the hurdles have fallen 
that otherwise needed leaping before being able to comprehensively design 
self-replicating space habitats, and all the computer and informational 
resources I thought I needed then are now available for cheap or free. For 
example, for only a few thousand dollars, I have the equivalent of an early 
1990s supercomputer in my office with terabytes of storage and a high speed 
color scanner and a network connection and access to Google and Wikipedia 
and so on. So, what I outlined in the 20th century is more and more doable 
in the 21st century for less and less cost. So, item 13 (the major goal 
[self-replicating and self-reliant habitats]) is now approachable without 
needing to do much on the other prerequisite items listed."

Still, my own complaint about the copyright and secrecy issue is that 
Appropedia (which I am not affiliate with, but is similar to my OSCOMAK 
project in some ways), did not win the first Buckminster Fuller challenge 
when William McDonough was one of the judges. Was there a sense that an 
excellent free project like Appropedia would compete with his business?
   http://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia
   http://challenge.bfi.org/application_summary/149
   http://challenge.bfi.org/jurors

OSCOMAK also did not get the prize the next year, either. :-)
   http://challenge.bfi.org/application_summary/362#
In both cases, specific projects were chosen for the challenge winner, not 
general tools for helping anyone be a better designer. Of course, there 
could be lots of reasons projects were not chosen (see my second failure 
mode above. :-)

But, it is often the case that even non-profits, with boards made of people 
successful in the current system, work against an open and abundant future 
for all. For example:
   "The NED, NGOs and the Imperial Uses of Philanthropy: Why They Hate Our 
Kind Hearts, Too"
   http://www.counterpunch.org/roelofs05132006.html
"""
If the source is confusing, the message is usually clear: "democratization" 
strives for civil rights and elections, but it also must include an open 
door to foreign capital, labor contracts, resource extraction, and military 
training. These networks also define "civil society" to include rock 
concerts and street mobs, but not government-provided maternal health 
clinics, child care, or senior services.
"""

See, there's the learned helplessness bitterness coming up again of my own 
failure mode. :-)

Anyway, I still have a lot of sympathy and respect for the guy. He's a human 
being trying to navigate a difficult transition from a competitive 
capitalist economy to a post-scarcity globally abundant society while also 
looking to his personal survival. It's not an easy situation for anybody to 
be in. And everyone makes mistakes.

People doing this sort of work openly as a hobby, or who do this work as a 
retired person with a basic income from social security, or a person who has 
inherited wealth, or one who has a working spouse who likes his or her job, 
or one who works at a grant-funded non-profit or government agency or 
university with support to work on sustainability issues, are on much safer 
ground to avoid one of these two extremes. Although each of those comes with 
baggage to:
* hobbyists often have limited time;
* retired people have less energy;
* inherited wealth usually comes with a world view and also guilt and 
enmeshment in things-as-they-are;
* stay-at-home parents have other responsibilities or the spouse may not 
like their job and complain about money issues;
* people in a university setting are ofter "Disciplined Minds";
* government agencies tend to hierarchical solutions that are politically 
directed; and
* non-profits are sometimes more about getting grants (including changing 
their programs to meet grantmakers criterion) than using the grants in an 
innovative or risk-taking way.

There are no easy answers to this. But, still, bit by bit, we seem to be 
crawling towards some better solutions. From Winston Churchill:
http://history-and-education.blogspot.com/2008/10/churchill-on-america-and-brief-research.html
"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have 
exhausted all other possibilities."

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/