Designers are inherently optimistic people who try to make the world a better place

In the end, the question is not, how do we use nature to serve our interests? It's how can we use humans to serve nature's interest?'

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

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!

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.

Imagine walking into a grocery there is a jar sitting there with a lid on it saying it's not carbon. That is ridiculous. It's an empty jar.