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.

It would be nice if all that exuberance and abundance was connected to a deep ethos of planetary responsibility.

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

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."

How do we love all the children of all species for all time?

We prefer to talk about 100% renewable instead of zero carbon. When you say zero carbon, you are not positively defined.

We are proposing buildings that, like trees, are net energy exporters, produce more energy than they consume, accrue and store solar energy, and purify their own waste, water and release it slowly in a purer form.