I bring you the warmest greetings from the United States, and I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk with you tonight about a new design for human enterprise and a hopeful course for human endeavor.

I see design as the first signal of human intention. I am a designer; I have intentions; the things I design express my intentions. We are all designers, and we all have intentions for the world. Most of us have positive, optimistic intentions. As we look into the future, we dream of prosperity or good health, we imagine a more hopeful state of affairs. Design does the same; by its very nature it is optimistic and creative. It can make the world a better place.

Yet when we look out today at the design of our world, we see tragedies in the making: global warming, persistent toxification, endocrine disruption, heavy metal contamination, drought, pestilence, ozone depletion and so on. We see that the design of our current system of industrial production, and the design of the buildings in which we live and work, is leading us to tragic consequences. We are no longer in a position to imagine that these tragedies are not of our making. The question is, did we intend for them to happen, and if not, do we intend to go on behaving as we are, and allow them to continue to happen? Insanity has been defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Perhaps this is the moment in our history when we realize that if today's tragedies are perpetuated by our everyday acts, then our cultures have adopted a strategy of tragedy. Any enterprise that recognizes that it has become strategically tragic must begin to determine an appropriate strategy of change. Only a strategy of change will give human enterprise an enduring strategy of hope.

A strategy of change requires us to understand that we must become humble, because we do not know what to do. This is new. We are accustomed to human designs built on the widely accepted assumptions of the industrial age. But if we see the tragic consequences of these designs, we recognize the need for innovation and creativity, open-mindedness and new intentions. Humility allows us to approach design from a new perspective. We recognize that we need a new design assignment.

If we looked at the current industrial system as a retroactive design assignment, it might sound something like this: Could we design a system of production that measures prosperity based on how many of our natural resources we bury, burn, poison or otherwise destroy? That measures progress by the number of smokestacks--and if we're especially proud, by the number of smokestacks with our name on them? Could we design a system that measures productivity by how few people are working? That destroys biological and cultural diversity at every turn as it applies one-size-fits-all solutions to design questions? Could we design a system that requires thousands of complex regulations to keep people and natural systems from being poisoned too quickly? And while we're at it, could we produce a few things so highly toxic, so dangerous, that they will require thousands of human generations to maintain constant vigilance, be wary of each other and live in terror?

From the perspective of someone concerned about social fairness, environmental health and economic viability, this appears to be the fundamental design assignment of the first industrial revolution, and it is in full swing around the world. Where it is not engaged, it is coming. The only design principle that seems to be at work is, "if brute force isn't working, you're not using enough of it!"

We need a new design assignment and we need a new design. In order to do this we need to ask new questions. In my offices there are two questions guiding our work. The first is: "How do we love all the children, of all species, for all time?" Please notice that I am not just saying our children; I am saying all of the children. And notice I am not just saying our species, I am saying all species. And notice I am not just saying now, I am saying for all time. When we integrate this question into our designs, wonderful and beautiful things begin to happen, and we'll show you some of those things soon.

But first, the second question: "What does it mean to be native to this place?" How many of us feel as if we are indigenous people? How many of us have a deep knowledge of our home landscape, a deep connection to our place? Certainly in China, with its many centuries of history, one could feel very well connected to this place. In the United States, most of our families have been on the continent for less than two hundred years. Our sense of time is very different. Our sense of place is very different. Our sense of space is very different.

At the Hanford Nuclear Facility in Washington state, where they make the plutonium for our bombs and our missiles, a symposium of scientists has gathered to discuss how to mark the ground where we have stored our dangerous plutonium wastes in such a way that even an extraterrestrial visiting us five thousand years from now would not dare to dig them up, and would be properly warned of the danger. The question was, what is the sign that will be universally understood to represent the gravest of danger. Some of the elders of the native tribe of this place, the Yakima, were at the same conference center for another meeting. They were talking with the scientists between meetings and heard what they were there to do. They laughed and said, "you don't really need to worry about this. We'll be here. We'll tell the extraterrestrials where it is." The Yakima were not leaving. What would it mean for all of us to imagine that our cultures will still be here five thousand years from now? What would it mean for us to imagine that all of our acts should be seen in that context? This suggests what it will mean to be native to this place.

The United States is predominantly a Christian nation, and there is much debate today about the idea, expressed in the King James version of the Bible, that man has "dominion" over the earth and all its plants and animals. Critics of the idea suggest that we should be better stewards of the earth, rather than simply its dominators. But dominion is implicit in stewardship; one cannot be the steward of something without controlling it. How could a shepherd steward his flock of sheep without the ability to dominate it? So in both "dominion" and "stewardship" there is the idea that human being is somehow separate from the rest of nature. In truth, humanity is interdependent with other life, as bound to living systems as fish and birds and trees. And so the question today is "How do we become part of the natural world, as one of its species, and celebrate our kinship with other life?" This perspective allows us to see that we are participants in a complex living system, a world in which abundant solar energy, photosynthesis, natural hydrology, geology, physics, and chemistry provide both sustenance and exquisite models for human designs. Following nature's laws, human creativity can elegantly and effectively address not simply of the survival of the human species, but the health and prosperity of a natural world in which we are an integral, essential, healthy part.

What would this look like? What would it mean to rethink our relationship to the world strategically? In the United States, one of our great strategic thinkers was Thomas Jefferson. As the dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Virginia I was able to live for five years in a house designed by Thomas Jefferson on the great lawn of the university that he designed. As such, I came to know Mr. Jefferson as a designer. And when I would go to Monticello, the house on the hill where he lived, and see his tombstone, which he designed, I realized that he saw himself as a designer-if one looks at his tombstone, one sees a record of his designs. Not only did he design his own tombstone, but on it he recorded only those things that he had designed. It reads, "Thomas Jefferson, Author of the Declaration of Independence, Of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom (which matured into the U.S. Bill of Rights) and Father of the University of Virginia." Notice he is only recording his legacies, not his activities; he is only recording the things that he designed. Notice that the tombstone does not mention that he was the President of the United States. Twice. For Jefferson, it was not important enough for him to record; it was simply an activity, not a legacy. Imagine being the President of the United States and not thinking it important enough to record for posterity. Thomas Jefferson was a designer. He was a strategist. Let us look at his designs as new design assignments, as an outline for a strategy of hope.

Imagine yourself in Thomas Jefferson's place in 1776, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Imagine yourself a young man, just 33 years old, waking up every morning to the daunting task of articulating the values of a new nation. Given his propensity for design, he may well have seen the writing of the Declaration of Independence as a design assignment. We can imagine him pacing his Philadelphia apartment asking himself, "How shall I design a document that persuasively articulates our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, free from remote tyranny?" Mr. Jefferson objected to the fact that the British crown was making decisions about local circumstances, about which it knew little and cared less. In contemporary parlance, we might say he believed that "all sustainability is local," which implies the importance of local knowledge to every human endeavor. He believed circumstances that undermined this essential value called for a new design, a new social framework for a free, sovereign people.

Today Mr. Jefferson would perhaps be calling for freedom from intergenerational remote tyranny, the idea that one generation might pollute the earth and destroy the ability of future generations to celebrate its abundance. He wrote in 1789: "The earth belongs to the living, no man may by natural right oblige the land he owns or occupies to debts greater than those that may be paid during his own lifetime." If he could, then the world would belong to the dead, and not to the living. The world belongs to the living.

If we look at his second design, the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, which matured into the Bill of Rights, we realize that at no point did the Founding Fathers of the United States ever expect that a company, or an individual, or a community would poison a river, or pollute the air. They simply could not imagine that we would do such a thing. Nowhere in the Bill of Rights does it give anyone the right to pollute. In fact, the right to kill is specifically preserved for the guardian of the government, not the individual, or commercial enterprises. The government, the guardian, reserves the right to go to war, to deal with criminals, and so forth. And in this way, the guardian is very different from commerce. It is slow, it is serious, it seeks to protect the public benefit, and in many ways it must shun commerce, because it must keep itself focused on the public interest.

Commerce, on the other hand, the world of business, is very quick, very resourceful, very creative. And commerce is essentially honest; you cannot do business with someone for very long if you are not trustworthy. Even so, we must be careful lest we corrupt the guardian with commercial transactions. And, on the other hand, we must be wary of the guardian's interference in commerce. Commerce is built for speed and action and the guardians regulations-which can be seen as a signal of design failure and thus as an opportunity for a new design-can slow commerce down. So as we move forward with our new design assignment we must be very clear about the role of guardian, and the role of commerce.

Jefferson's concept of rights today extends beyond the human world to the rights of nature itself. We can see this in the U.S. Endangered Species Act and in the international treaties that give whales and other creatures the right to exist in good health on the planet. From this perspective, when we see the loss of species and the dwindling numbers of animals like pandas and cranes; when we see our environment being destroyed by flooding, by desertification, by toxification, by drought, then perhaps we can begin to see that nature itself must be seen as having the right to exist. That right is not simply an expression of benevolence toward nature. Nature's rights are intrinsic to our human rights and our ability to exist, for we are part of the natural world. This idea generates the central questions of intelligent design: What is our relationship to the natural world? How do we follow nature's laws? How can our designs reflect the abundance and productivity of the natural world? As our understanding of nature grows through the practice of design, we can also better understand the impacts of human activity on nature, and perhaps begin to create designs that actually enhance human and environmental health.

If we look at the design of a ship as a metaphor, we can see that our ancestors plied the waters of the Yangtze and the South China Sea in ships powered by the sun. They were captained by people who understood the natural forces of wind, wave and current. They were built from native materials derived from the sun-such as wood and woven plants-that would return to the sea or to the rivers to feed the ecosystem. Today, our ships and fishing boats ply the waters of the world powered by fossil fuels, belching smoke into the sky and oil into the water. They are operated by people working in darkness shoveling fossil fuels into the mouths of boilers. And the amazing thing is, we are still designing steamships. Every time I stand inside an auditorium full of artificial light, I find myself inside the boiler room of a steamship. We discuss global warming and nuclear hazards, while we produce global warming and nuclear hazards. We need a new design.

As I work with clients to change the design of the world, we are guided by The Hannover Principles, a set of design guidelines I developed in 1992 with my colleague, the German chemist Michael Braungart. You will see as I show you the Hannover Principles and some examples of our work that I am not talking here about environmental design at any cost. The principles inspire designs that achieve social benefits, ecological intelligence and economic value simultaneously. Indeed, both businesses and communities have found our designs to be immensely profitable and beneficial.

The first Hannover Principle says: Insist on the rights of humanity and nature to coexist in a healthy, supportive, diverse and sustainable condition. Notice we used the word "insist", which clearly doesn't mean please hope that someone else will do if for you.

Moving on from the 2nd thru the last principle, we see a framework for intelligent design coming into focus:

2. Recognize interdependence. The elements of human design interact with and depend upon the natural world, with broad and diverse implications at every scale. Expand design considerations to recognize even distant effects.

3. Respect relationships between spirit and matter. Consider all aspects of human settlement including community, dwelling, industry and trade in terms of existing and evolving connections between spiritual and material consciousness.

4. Accept responsibility for the consequences of design decisions upon human well-being, the viability of natural systems and their right to coexist.

5. Create safe objects of long-term value. Do not burden future generations with requirements for maintenance or vigilant administration of potential danger due to the careless creation of products, processes or standards.

6. Eliminate the concept of waste. Evaluate and optimize the full life-cycle of products and processes, to approach the state of natural systems, in which there is no waste.

7. Rely on natural energy flows. Human designs should, like the living world, derive their creative forces from perpetual solar income. Incorporate this energy efficiently and safely for responsible use.

8. Understand the limitations of design. No human creation lasts forever and design does not solve all problems. Those who create and plan should practice humility in the face of nature. Treat nature as a model and mentor, not as an inconvenience to be evaded or controlled.

9. Seek constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge. Encourage direct and open communication between colleagues, patrons, manufacturers and users to link long-term sustainable considerations with ethical responsibility, and re-establish the integral relationship between natural processes and human activity.

Now let me show you some designs, ranging in scale from the molecule to region. In Switzerland, at a mill where textile trimmings had been declared hazardous waste-they could not bury or burn them in Switzerland, they had to ship them to Spain to burn-we designed and introduced a new, completely compostable upholstery fabric. Working with a giant chemical company we looked at 8,000 chemicals used in the textile industry, and using the intellectual filters of no more cancer, no more birth defects, no endocrine disruption; no heavy metal contamination or immune system damage or allergies; no persistent toxification or ozone depletion, we discovered 38 chemicals with benign or beneficial effects. We designed and produced the entire fabric line using those 38 chemicals. It was hugely profitable, with costs reduced by 20 percent. It did not require regulation: the water coming out of the textile mill is as clean as or cleaner than the water going in. The mill's clippings, formerly considered hazardous waste, are now used to build and enhance soil for local garden clubs.

Is this important to China? As China privatizes, perhaps instead of developing a huge regulatory infrastructure-an overbearing guardian monitoring the negative affects of industry-it could celebrate and support industry's potential positive effects on water, energy, public health and so on. Industrial support could include developing intelligent design protocols, which would include a full lifecycle assessment so that products and materials can be truly recycled, creating health and enduring value rather than sickness and waste. There is a great and ancient tradition in China for the return of nutrition to the fields. This concept can be equally applied to industrial systems, where the technical nutrition-the polymers and chemicals and mineral resources-can be returned for reuse. Michael Braungart and I look at these organic and technical resources as the two fundamental kinds of nutrition that feed manufacturing systems. We call organic products biological nutrients, which are materials designed to be returned to the earth after their useful lives to regenerate the organic vitality of the soil. In the high-tech sphere, technical nutrients are designed specifically to return to industry to provide high quality materials for new products. Products such as these, like our biodegradable fabric, are examples of what we call cradle-to-cradle design-a system in which all products are designed to provide nutrition to biological and technical systems, eliminating the concept of waste.

Take a look at a computer today. What we want from it is the service of computing, internet access and so on. We don't necessarily want all the materials. Perhaps these machines, like televisions, cars, cameras and other goods could be conceived as what we call products of service designed to return to the industrial system. Manufacturers could recover their valuable materials and reuse them in safely and profitably in new products that provide the latest service to loyal customers. The materials, cycled endlessly through industrial cycles, would generate value and delightful services over thousands of years. Wouldn't this be a marvelous opportunity for new designs. We are already working with major industrial companies on designs for products of service, including Nike, in the shoe industry; Ford Motor Company, in the automobile industry; Gamesa of Spain, in the energy industry with Gamesa of Spain, Herman Miller in the furniture industry; and in the chemical industry with BASF, the largest chemical company in the world, which recently announced a huge project in China.

On the architectural front, I want to show you a building in Oberlin, Ohio: an environmental studies center designed to eventually make more energy than it needs to operate, and purify its own water. Imagine a building like a tree. Imagine a building that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, builds soil, creates habitat and microclimates, changes colors with the seasons, and self replicates. Compared to a tree, how sophisticated is human design? At Oberlin we took a few steps towards the tree's elegant participation in the landscape.

Now let me show you a building done for the corporate clothing company The Gap, in San Bruno, California. We entered the Gap's architectural competition with the concept of a building that would have a roof like a rolling meadow of undulating native grasses. A bird flying overhead would look down and say, "How wonderful, it's our people, they are back." The workers would enjoy a place that was full of daylight and fresh air. And all of this was to be done for the same budget as a conventional office building in this part of the world. We won the competition, and the building was built. This is the roof of native grasses. How many buildings do you know that make oxygen? When we designed all the windows to open, we thought fresh air was simply a good idea. The Wall Street Journal, our biggest financial newspaper thought it was news. We told the Wall Street Journal's reporter that when a window that opens becomes news, we have reached a low point of civilization.

Here is a village we are designing for the University of California at Davis. The extension of the campus, which will bring in 7,000 more students, is being designed so that the new village is beneficial to the landscape and the college community, so that growth is good. We are cataloging where the wind comes from, where the sun comes from, where the water comes from, and where it goes. We are designing a village that will make more energy than it needs to operate, purify its own water, provide free cooling breezes and comfort for all its inhabitants. It will be a safe, thriving community, which we hope to be building with new technical systems that are both less expensive and more effective than conventional technologies. We are also looking to make our building materials from straw and steel-a biological and a technical nutrient-and it appears that the cost will be substantially less than conventional construction.

This is rice straw. China has rice straw in abundance. China, like the United States, has a problem with air quality and here it is partly due to the burning of rice straw. What if instead of burning rice straw, we built super-efficient homes with it? Instead of waste and poor health, an intelligent building material.

This is our new industrial facility for the Ford Motor Company in Dearborn, Michigan. The largest integrated industrial plant in the world, the Rouge Center was Henry Ford's icon of linear engineering. Iron ore and coal came in at one end, and cars came out the other. We are redoing it now with their new chairman, William Clay Ford, Jr., Henry Ford's great-grandson. The restoration of the site includes an assembly plant with the largest grass roof in the world, purifying water and making oxygen. When it rains, storm water drains slowly from the roof, absorbed by succulent plants. Rain falling on the rest of the site is absorbed by porous paving; water percolates through the porous surface and the sand beds beneath, then flows slowly through a wetland system that takes the water safely back to the river. All of this will cost $13 million but it is saving Ford $35 million over conventionally engineered pipes and chemical treatment plants.

Here is a picture of Chicago, Illinois. The city of Chicago, under Mayor Richard Daley, has declared it would like to be the greenest city in the world. Why? Because it wants to ensure its economic vitality and its quality of life. Mayor Daley realizes that economic vitality, social well-being, and environmental quality are interconnected; you cannot have one without the others. We are working with the city to develop and apply the concept of the city as the center of a metabolism. It is ultimately, as William Cronon has said, "nature's metropolis." Let me read to you from Claude Levi Strauss:

"Cities have often been likened to symphonies and poems, and the comparison seems to me a perfectly natural one. They are in fact objects of the same kind. The city may even be rated higher since it stands at the point where nature and artifice meet. A city is a congestion of animals whose biological history is enclosed within boundaries, and yet every conscious and rational act on the part of these creatures helps to shape the city's eventual character. By its form as by the manner of its birth, the city has elements at once of biological procreation, organic evolution, and esthetic creation. It is both a natural object and a thing to be cultivated; individual and group; something lived and something dreamed. It is the human invention, par excellence."

What does this mean? Among many things, it means that a city could be the home of technical nutrition, and the countryside the home of biological nutrition. And as the city brings in biological nutrition-its food, its natural resources-from the country, it utilizes them to good effect to support its people, and then it returns them to the countryside to rebuild the health of the soil. On the other hand, the city could be the place where we make things, where the industrial producers of cars, tractors, computers and communication devices send beneficial goods out into the world and accepts them back as resources for new products that only cities can make. What a marvelous prospect for the billions of people in China and the United States.

I'd like to finish by telling a story from Curitiba, Brazil. Curitiba is an amazing place. It has grown from 6,000 people to two and a half million people in the last 20 years. With a growth rate not unheard of here in China, it has multiplied its green space by a factor of 50. It has found ways to provide all of its people, especially its poor, with safe, nutritious organic food from the city's farms. It has built a public transportation system that is second to none in the world. In fact, they make their busses at their own factories. And when they built a library for the city, instead of building a central building, the Mayor decided to put little libraries all over the city, so that all the children could get to the library by walking for no more than twelve minutes. If a child was too poor to buy books, she could collect garbage on her way to the library, recycle it and get paid in all the books she ever needed for school. Every child was given access to the World Wide Web where they can communicate for free and research subjects of interest internationally. Some of the citizens complained that children from outside the city were coming to use the libraries. They said the parents of these children weren't part of the city and did not pay taxes. When the mayor heard this, he said, "When we begin to love the children, we must love all of the children. And if the city does not love these children too, then these children will grow up hating the city. And if these children hate the city, they will destroy the city."

And what I would like to say tonight to all of us, as designers signaling our intentions, is that it is indeed time for us to imagine what it would be like to love all the children-all of them. Chinese children, American children, children of pandas, children of cranes. Because, if the world cannot love all of its children, then those children may grow to resent the world. And if they don't love the world, they may begin to hate the world. And if they hate the world, they will destroy it.