McDonough + Hawken

Both McDonough's Ted Talks and Hawken's list of principles for sustainability talk about the crises of using too much resources.

I like McDonough's Ted Talks better, because he actually gave out some possible solution there instead of naming whom we should blame to. His idea of planting on the roof tops is really interesting. Although "green roof" is not a new idea, he brought it one step beyond. Planting vegetables and plants on roof tops can help clean the air, it's a good use of the space, and we can also eat the vegetables.
Just imagine how many empty roof tops we have, around the world. It would be a "waste" if we don't have any good use of them. Some Asians, specially people from China and Taiwanese, hang their clothes on their roof tops, but by doing that doesn't really give anything back to the environment. Of course, they at least aren't "wasting" those roof tops, however, McDonough's idea can give out more to the community.

Hawken has the point that no matter how many little things we're doing at home to save energy, the big companies and corporation can still use all the resources faster than we can save them. We have been talking about how most corporation could harm the environment, but I still believe that we can't just go and blame on them and tell them to stop what they are doing. In a cold way of saying this, they are simply making a living. Mr. Sheu showed us a movie in his class, called "Thank You For Smoking", last week. It's a story about a cigarette company's going against the people that wanted to promote a non-smoking environment. From the movie, it shouws you that even the people working in the company already knew the facts about smoking too much, they still try their best to sell them out. Why? Because that is their job and they believe the costomers should be able to chose for themselves.
I would fight against the ones that purposly add other chemicals into their products to fool their costumers, but I would not blame most of the corporation for hurting the environment. Without them, a lot of us would not be having what we have right now.

Wast Not V.S. Senior Project

The article, Waste Not, from the book, Natural Capitalism, tells us how much waste we actually are producing. You know, those interesting statistics that show you how much it really costs just to make a bottle of water. It also goes one step beyond and talks about how expensive it is, to keep prisoners. It makes us to be more aware of how much we are "wasting" just by purchasing most of the products or maybe even doing wrongdoings to get ourselves into jails. It has a good point, we are producing a lot of wastes.

Now the question is, "what is a 'waste'?"

When you accidentally made an ugly mark on a piece of white paper, does it mean you just wasted that paper? It's either a "yes" or a "no", and it depends on one thing; Are you going to use the other side of that paper?

As I mentioned earlier, I would like to work at T-shirt designs for my senior project. The best way to create a lot of "waste" is by printing many shirts and have them all ended up in a trash can, instead of those green, giant, metal boxes that send clothes to places where people would be happy to wear anything that fits. Since that is the case, I would say one way to prevent from wasting is to print shirts only when I am sure the design is set to go. If I don't have too much confidence, I might as well let people order before I even print them.

To even create lesser "waste", I can even use used shirts. That way I would be taking the other people's "waste" and turning them into things that no longer look like "wastes".
Hopefully.