William McDonough is a hero.

I’ll paraphrase to give you a sense of what William McDonough offers to the world:

If we, as a people, wanted to design a system that mines the poisons of the Earth and efficiently distributes them all over the world, if we wanted to inhibit the ability of our planet to regulate and maintain the environment that supports our life, and if we wanted to create dirty wasteful technologies that lead to things like a swirling mass of plastic bags the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean – if this is what we have wanted to design and create, then we have been wildly successful.

As an architect, McDonough sees the world through the lens of design. We humans identify needs and problems and design solutions to meet them. He asks, "what do we want to design?"





What I love most about his message is its optimism. Of course it's important that we acknowledge the truth in the Malthusian doom and gloom that embodies environmentalism. Then, fully informed of our risk, we can turn and embrace the optimism so well articulated by Mr. McDonough.