4

Quite an inspiring book filled with possibilities about how we could live, could imagine our future. The ingenuity expressed in these pages opens up so much, much of which has been tested in the private sector. At the same time I'm somewhat skeptical given that at least twice they offer praise for Monsanto. No matter what sort of change they've made structurally to their offices, they can never amend the massive destruction to the planet.

Changed my way of thinking about design and daily life, easy to read

I've heard this years ago. Its great, its argument is that we need to re-engineer products, so that when we are done with them, all parts could be recycled and reused. This is a hard problem, but it needs to be considered during design and manufacturing. Actually we need to develop more products that generate less waste. It so had to think about this in our throw-away society.

Be more like ants and cherry trees. I just saved you the trouble of reading this repetitive bore.

Other than that, be prepared for rhetorical questions--basically the same one using a different example or with slight variations in phrasing: "What would have happened, we sometimes wonder, if the Industrial Revolution had taken place in societies that emphasize the community over the individual, and where people believed not in a cradle-to-grave life cycle but in reincarnation?"

Seriously, I just saved you 186 pages. Thank me at your leisure.

Pros: You can throw this book in a lake and it will survive.
Cons: It will survive.

This book was soooooooo hard for me to get through but I don’t think it was the book’s fault bc it was definitely interesting. So glad that I finished though.

I'm ignoring the standard BS such a "best-seller" pop-science book has to be laden with.
The standard screed to holistically think about the effect of product design would likely be considered uncontroversial by literally anyone.
Kudos to the authors for clearly pointing out out how many "eco-friendly" products are not necessarily better than their previous "non-eco-friendly" ones and there are always trade-offs to be made in all engineering problems.

What's interesting to me is that this book was apparently a best-seller a decade ago. For an "environmentalist" book it's surprisingly cheerful and optimistic compared to standard, almost hopeless, rhetoric of such activism now. Did the ideas in the book seep so well in the corporate culture that it's no longer newsworthy?
Or does it reflect the utter failure of the ideas in the book to equate to any real tangible gains? Hard for me to tell.

Some of the examples seem a bit dated now, twenty years later, but the key concepts were a shot of adrenaline to my ecological imagination.

McD and B clearly share an editor with Thomas Friedman- no one. While the central idea of the book is certainly interesting, and the authors definitely present some new insights, the book is so badly organized and poorly edited that the positive messages get lost in a sea of digressions. While their lack of focus is a real problem- I found myself constantly flipping back to the section titles to remember what the point was- their florid language is fatal: imagining what the world would be like if every factory worked like a tree doesn't in the slightest help make it so. An unfortunate train wreck.

Deep thoughts ... I feel like it only reminded me how screwed we really are.

Ich musste "Cradle-to-cradle" für mein Studium lesen und fand es echt gut.
Zu Beginn ist es sehr schwarzmalerisch, was ein bisschen demotiviert. Zeitgleich bieten die Autoren aber immer wieder Lösungen an, wie man diese Probleme der Produktion, wie wir sie heute haben, aus der Welt schaffen können.
Was ich ein bisschen schade fand, war das sehr lange zum eigentlichen Thema hingeleitet wurde. Im Grunde beschreibt Cradle-to-cradle die Kreislaufwirtschaft nach zwei unterschiedlichen Kreisen: den biologischen und den technischen Kreislauf. Dieser Ansatz wurde aber erst relativ spät beschrieben.
Das Buch ist aber sehr gut geschrieben. Es wurde schön beschrieben und erklärt, was gemeint ist und kein z.B. chemisches Fachwissen vorausgesetzt. Teilweise waren schon fast poetische Zitate enthalten.
4 Sterne✨

Did you know that before the Industrial Revolution, everyone grew their own food? That it was only during the Industrial Revolution that factory workers no longer had enough time to farm and were forced to move to the city and depend on others for it? That banks and stock markets and what have you all came into existence only during the Industrial Revolution, to support the new-born Capitalist Machine?
Oh, how naïve you were to think non-agrarian middle classes and banks were around for millennia before the Industrial Revolution, and that stock markets date back to the 12th or 13th century!

Alright, so the book's central thesis is straightforward and relatively uncontroversial (and completely apparent from the title); the incredible amount of bullshit it's draped in gets on my nerves.
This nonsense about the Industrial Revolution is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fields in which the authors are jarringly ignorant, though admittedly basic history is probably their weakest point (with basic biology being a close second). There's also a lot of handwaving about agriculture, the way people build houses, "chemicals" in consumer products from countries with weaker regulations than ours, "chemicals" in consumer products from poor recycling practices, "chemicals" in consumer products that are legal in our countries but poorly understood, "chemicals" in our fertilisers, "chemicals" in our drinking water from our sewage treatment techniques, the artistic and spiritual aridity of efficiency, the counter-productiveness of many current environmental programs, &c.; sensible things can be said on each (well, most) of these topics, but the authors don't. Instead, they're only there as contentless shibboleths for other brain-dead environmentalists. (Which is ironic, given the authors' attacks on this very group.)

In addition to this, the whole thing is steeped in so much romanticisation of pre-industrial societies and nature in general that it's actually painful to read at times. Apparently cherry trees and ant colonies are wonderful examples of sustainability and balance with nature, as if cherry trees don't want to deprive other plants of as much sunlight as they can possibly get away with, and as if ants don't regularly collapse entire ecosystems. And of course, before the Great Satan Industry reared its ugly head, humans approached nature with reverence and respect, and lived in tune with nature; the fact that, for example, nearly all megafauna disappeared on all continents right about the time the first humans arrived, why, that's just a coincidence.

The sad part is that none of it is even *necessary* to support the authors' thesis, which is that resources are finite and it would therefore be a good idea to stop removing them from the industrial ecosystem entirely when we're done with them for the time being. Any idiot could see that that just makes sense.
Of course, it's hard to fill an entire book with just that. Even with all the nonsense, they didn't even manage to get to 200 pages.

All of that, and the fact that most of their sub-ideas (like products as a service) are just brain-damaged, make Cradle to Cradle the kind of wooly-minded mush that gives environmentalism a bad name. Which is a pity, because it could have been great.