Cradle to Cradle

Cradle to Cradle In this book the authors and environmentalists William McDonough and Michael Braungart discuss how very un-eco friendly are the people that design our world, from our buildings to the products we use and consume. They talk about how our solutions for our environmental problems, such as recycling, are basically just a band-aid fix for broken bone. They discuss the negative effects that our daily lives have on our environment and offer some solutions of their own to help counteract the problem as much as possible, even the book Cradle to Cradle is printed on eco-friendly paper that does not use trees. In this book McDonough and Braungart urge its readers to take our environment into account and look for better solutions to our global environmental problems then the ones that we have been settling for for the last half-century. In this book McDonough and Braungart identify two major problems with the way that we live that negatively affects our environment. The first is the problem of throwing things away, because in fact when we throw things away, they do not just go away. The things that we throw out stay here on our Earth, soiling our precious and finite earth and affect its well-being. The second problem that they discuss the the harmful product that are used, which not only have negative impacts on our planet, but also on ourselves. In this book the authors urge us to learn from nature through bio-mimicry, an effort to design buildings like trees, cities like forests. They also challenge us to look at ants and the role they play in the world and their self-sustaining way of life and to learn from them. Ants are able to inhabit a diverse a range of environments, are able to hunt, scavenge, and grow their own food, build their homes, effectively handle their wastes, create powerful medicines, and produce biological and chemical weapons, all the while contributing to the health of the natural world. We live on this earth