From aclark@plant.uoguelph.ca Mon Feb 22 17:11:44 1999 Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 11:18:48 EST From: "E. Ann Clark, Associate Professor" To: sanet-mg@amani.ces.ncsu.edu Subject: Re: First the seed/serving mankind Folks: I had the inordinant pleasure of hearing a really first-rate, world-class speaker at the PASA conference last week. If you EVER get a chance to read or hear William McDonough, Dean of Architecture at Univ. Virginia, DO IT! As I get older and more crochety, I am less and less easy to impress. This guy impressed me a LOT! Among the many gems of his presentations (I bought all three as tapes, something I virtually never do; perhaps they are still available Lyn G? Tim B.?), was one comment cogent to the current discussion on corporations and regulations. He said something like "regulations are an indication of a design flaw". He attributed the need for regulations on toxic effluents, for example, to a flaw in the design of the system such that it actually created and released the effluents in the first place. He and his associates (in his spare time, he is a principal in a thoroughly novel company partnering his unique perspective on design with the equally remarkable and versatile skills of a chemist; their clientele currently has annual earnings of $400 billion, including WalMart, Nike, and the like) have actually designed and built systems where the effluent was cleaner than the incoming water. Yes, built and operational. Not airy fairy, "wouldn't it be nice" stuff, but actually in the ground and functioning. To do this, he starts from "first principles", such as "waste=food", whereby everything needs to be separated into two categories - either something is biological and decomposable to produce "food" and ultimately raw materials for growth, via natural processes, OR, it is "technical food", such as the parts of a TV set, which need to be broken down into component parts and reused as "food" again for new TV's or whatever, permanently. The key point is not to mix these two types of "food". So, getting back to the question of regulations being an indicator of a design flaw, how would we judge the hugely regulation-based biocide industry (e.g. life science companies)? By his reasoning, the fact that regulations are needed at all - to keep us from killing each other too fast, in McDonough's memorable phrasing - should be telling us that the process of making and using biocides is hugely flawed. So, what do we do about it? In the above example, McDonough spoke of redesigning a textile plant. They started with the 7000+ chemicals that are used in making textiles. Using their own "intellectual screen" to exclude anything that was carcinogenic, mutagenic,....endocine disruptor.... .bioaccumulative...heavy metal...etc, they eliminated 6,970 chemicals. They then designed the whole plant around the remaining 30 or so chemicals, and came up with a wholly new fabric, new dyes, etc. By applying his deliciously novel thinking, they were able to avoid the need for regulation, at all, because the types of effluents that had formerly been of concern were eliminated at source, by the design of the plant itself. Why not!? Surely, this is at least part of the motivation behind organic farming? Design a system that self-regulates, using crop rotation and management practices in conjunction with natural predator/prey relations to avoid the need for biocides at all? Design a system that actively prevents nutrient loss and soil erosion/degradation, whether by minimizing the frequency of wide-row annual crops in the rotation or by increasing use of narrow-row winter cereals or and perennial sod crops that withhold the land from cultivation? Yes, why not indeed. Ann ACLARK@plant.uoguelph.ca Dr. E. Ann Clark Associate Professor Crop Science University of Guelph Guelph, ON N1G 2W1 Phone: 519-824-4120 Ext. 2508 FAX: 519 763-8933 http://www.oac.uoguelph.ca/www/CRSC/faculty/eac.htm To Unsubscribe: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "unsubscribe sanet-mg". To Subscribe to Digest: Email majordomo@ces.ncsu.edu with the command "subscribe sanet-mg-digest". All messages to sanet-mg are archived at: http://www.sare.org/san/htdocs/hypermail