If we think about things having multiple lives, cradle to cradle, we could design things that can go back to either nature or back to industry forever.

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.

Don't get me wrong: I love nuclear energy! It's just that I prefer fusion to fission. And it just so happens that there's an enormous fusion reactor safely banked a few million miles from us. It delivers more than we could ever use in just about 8 minutes. And it's wireless!

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

Richard Meier told me, 'Young man, solar energy has nothing to do with architecture.'

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

Our concept of eco-effectiveness means working on the right things - on the right products and services and systems - instead of making the wrong things less bad. Once you are doing the right things, then doing them "right," with the help of efficiency among other tools, makes perfect sense.