The surest way to heal an eco-system is to connect it to more of itself.

Peter Drucker has pointed out that it is a manager's job to "do things right." It is an executive's job to make sure "the right things" get done. Even the most rigorous eco-efficient business paradigm does not challenge basic practices and methods: a shoe, building, factory, car, or shampoo can remain fundamentally ill-designed even as the materials and processes involved in its manufacture become more "efficient."

We celebrate the cherry tree not for its efficiency but for its effectiveness - and for its beauty. Its materials are in constant flow, and all those thousands of useless cherry blossoms look gorgeous. Then they fall to the ground and become soil again, so there's no problem

You need that same creative force that exists in a building like Disney [Walt Disney Concert Hall] to actually tackle that most prosaic of problems.

Carbon in your body - that's good thing. In a tree, it's good. In the atmosphere, it's a bad. Nature wants to sequester carbon in biota. And when we burn it, we release it. It's the wrong system.

Here's where redesign begins in earnest, where we stop trying to be less bad and we start figuring out how to be good.

The Stone Age did not end because humans ran out of stones. It ended because it was time for a re-think about how we live.