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I first became aware of William McDonough's work
in 1984, when he redesigned the national headquarters
of the Environmental Defense Fund. The redesign
of the EDF office was a watershed event. Not only
was it the first "green" office in New York City,
it also laid the foundation for a new design philosophy:
a commercially productive, socially beneficial
and ecologically intelligent approach to the making
of things that Bill and his colleague Michael
Braungart would come to call eco-effectiveness.
When I hired Bill to design the Heinz family
offices and Heinz Foundation offices in Pittsburgh
in 1991, he and Michael had just been commissioned
by the City of Hannover to develop a set of design
principles for the 2000 World's Fair. Having chosen
"Humanity, Nature and Technology" as the theme
of the fair, the city wanted to showcase hopeful
visions for a sustainable future. The Hannover
Principles were to put forth an inspiring standard,
presenting to the world the first coherent framework
for rethinking design through the lens of sustainability.
Getting to know Bill and Michael as colleagues
and friends over the last ten years has given
me the opportunity to see firsthand the impact
of the Hannover Principles. From their elegant
insistence on "the rights of humanity and nature
to co-exist" to their call to "eliminate the concept
of waste," the Principles echo the deep human
instinct—and wisdom—to care for the
world. Indeed, they have become a cultural touchstone,
providing information and grounding not just for
the design community but also for all those devoted
to bringing forth a world of social equity, environmental
health and peaceful prosperity.
 At
their core is a simple truth: Human health, the
strength of our economy and the well-being of
our environment are all connected. I learned this
lesson early in life, as a child growing up in
Mozambique. In the East Africa of my youth, the
interplay of nature, health and survival was a
given, something that people who lived close to
the natural world intuitively understood. For
me, that understanding was reinforced by having
a father who was a doctor. Observing him and the
questions he asked of his patients taught me how
illness can be related to environment and the
practices of daily life.
We lived in a place where nature's laws of cause
and effect were fairly clear. If you went swimming
at sunrise or sunset, feeding time for sharks
and river crocodiles (and indeed, for all the
animals in the savannah), you might get a nasty
nibble. We learned to respect the rules of the
natural world because they had such obvious implications
for people's personal well-being. Nature taught
us the virtues of prevention—of solving problems
by not creating them in the first place.
Industrialized societies tend to be less in touch
with nature's rules. In the nineteenth century,
the paradigm was that we should tame nature; in
the twentieth, it became a sense that we are almost
immune to its rules. Today, we tend to think of
the natural world as somehow separate, an entity
"out there" that can be controlled, held at bay
or even ignored. Even our efforts to protect the
environment have been informed by this "us versus
it" mentality, a sense that we are in competition
with the natural world and that the best we can
hope for is to mitigate the damage we cause.
The simple genius behind the nine Hannover Principles
was that they reframed the issue. Rather than
take a certain amount of ecological harm as a
given, with people on various sides of the environmental
debate reduced to arguing over the permissible
amount, Bill and Michael invited us to consider
an alternative. Why not just design products and
institutions that support the environment, they
asked?
The Hannover Principles were the first expression
of that transforming idea. In nine lean declarations
they set forth a value system and a design framework
that Bill and Michael continue to use as the foundation
of their evolving design paradigm. As they write
in Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make
Things, nature's cycles are not just lean
and efficient; they are abundant, effective and
regenerative. By going beyond mere efficiency
to celebrate the abundance of nature, the practice
of eco-effective, cradle-to-cradle design allows
us to create materials, dwellings, workplaces,
and commercial enterprises that generate not fewer
negative impacts but more productivity, more pleasure
and more restorative effects.
The key insight of eco-effective or cradle-to-cradle
thinking is recognizing the materials of our daily
lives—even highly technical, synthetic industrial
materials—as nutrients that can be designed
to circulate in human systems very much like nitrogen,
water, and simple sugars circulate in nature's
nutrient cycles. Rather than using materials once
and sending them to the landfill—our current
cradle-to-grave system—cradle-to-cradle materials
are designed to be returned safely to the soil
or to flow back to industry to be used again and
again.
 Far
more than a theoretical notion, this central principle
of sustainability can be readily seen in the work
of Bill's architectural firm, William McDonough
+ Partners, and Bill and Michael's industrial
design consultancy, MBDC. Working with clients ranging from small
companies like the Swiss textile mill Rohner to
global megacorporations like the Ford Motor Company,
both firms are showing that designers attuned
to this cradle-to-cradle philosophy can replicate
nature's closed-loop systems in the worlds of
commerce and community. The result: safe, beneficial
materials that either naturally biodegrade or
provide high-quality resources for the next generation
of products; buildings designed to produce more
energy than they consume; cities and towns tapped
into local energy flows; places in every human
realm that renew a sense of participation in the
landscape.
My own hopes for the urban landscapes of Pittsburgh
brought the Hannover Principles home, literally.
At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, where the
Principles were introduced to the international
community, I invited Bill and Michael to come
to Pittsburgh to share their ideas. Both were
invited to lecture at Carnegie Mellon University
and, as I had hoped, the Hannover Principles became
a part of the dialogue going on in Pittsburgh
at the time about the region's environmental future.
Today, Pittsburgh is gaining national recognition
as a leader in green building and sustainable
design. In many ways, that began with the building
of the Heinz family offices, which represented
the first, commercial-scale use of sustainably
harvested tropical wood. Our offices served as
a laboratory and model for others to learn from,
and not just locally. The Discovery Channel covered
it; architectural magazines wrote about it; and
builders, designers and architects from across
the country came to study its features. Since
then, the ideas articulated in the Hannover Principles
have never been far from the minds of the staff
at The Heinz Endowments as they have advanced
our green building agenda in Pittsburgh over the
past decade.
Those ideas are making communities from Pittsburgh
to Chicago and from Shanghai to Barcelona better
places to live. They are helping people create
buildings and landscapes where natural processes
unfold with renewed vitality. They are transforming
product design and shaping the work of such influential
companies and institutions as Ford, Nike, BASF,
the University of California, the Woods Hole Research
Center and Oberlin College. As more and more companies
and institutions adopt these sustaining principles,
there is also the chance that the global economy
as a whole will begin to find robust health and
long-term strength through the practice of intelligent
design.
Ultimately, that is the enduring value of the
Hannover Principles and the reason why they are
as fresh and necessary as ever. The Principles
urge us to start seeing ourselves as part of the
natural world and to replicate the joyful, productive
and intelligent practice of life itself.
Teresa Heinz, chairman of the Heinz Family Philanthropies
and of the Howard Heinz Endowment, is the creator
of the prestigious Heinz Awards and co-creator
of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics
and the Environment, which brings together representatives
from business, government, the scientific community
and environmental groups to collaborate on the
development of scientifically sound environmental
policies.
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