New Site Feed

You may have noticed that we've added automatically updating RSS feeds (what is RSS?) above and to the right column of the Greene Futures blog. The box at the top of this column is a widget which projects the articles we pick to share from our own Google Reader RSS subscriptions. With it, we will publish the most important and interesting pieces from our daily reading (encompassing 1000+ articles daily from 304 independent outlets, including news articles, blog posts, journal offerings, new books, and published reports). Greene Future's regular sources are listed to the bottom right-hand side of the blog. We spend hours every day combing through this mountain of information, running the gamut of world news, foreign affairs, trends, energy developments, scientific findings, technological innovations, environmental issues, business events and economic ramifications.

But for you, dear reader, we provide fertile seeds sorted from the chaff. Meaty, actionable intelligence wrestled from a tangle of information overload.

This is just one step in a series to make this site the most useful depot for its readers in all things related to future trends. There exists no satisfactory list of all the news outlets, futurist thinkers and analysis sources to date. It's a full-time job attempting to track down all the little bits of evidence from every corner of the information sphere, and an even more intimidating task groping toward some understanding of what it all means.

Please make sure and subscribe to the Greene Futures blog feed (click here to subscribe). It will allow you to automatically stay abreast of news, analysis and updates from Greene Futures through your favored RSS Reader (Google Reader, My Yahoo RSS, RSS Reader, etc.). And if you frankly have no idea what I've been talking about with all this RSS nonsense, check out the video below:

William McDonough and Cradle to Cradle

William McDonough, author of Cradle to Cradle, is the most intelligent voice in the clean tech movement right now. In 1999, Time Magazine recognized him as a "hero of the planet." His book itself is published on Durabook "paper," constructed of a paper-like plastic that can be recycled without loosing structural integrity, and is waterproof, to boot (as seen above). McDonough's day-job is as founder of William McDonough + Partners, a leading architectural firm. He's designed the world's largest grass roof (10.4 acres) for a Ford Motor Company plant in Dearborn, Michigan. On the first day, the plant saved Ford $35 million dollars in operating costs. McDonough has been contracted by the Chinese government to build 12 entire cities along the Cradle to Cradle model. If this makes enough business sense to woo billions of dollars from the stereotypically un-environmental Ford Motor Company and People's Republic of China, might it be good enough for you?

His Cradle to Cradle innovation is to imagine a "technological metabolism" modeled upon the "biological metabolism" which we're all well-familiar. There is no waste in nature, dead animals and plants are broken down and turned into nutrients for the soil (even rocks and metal become the iron, zinc, magnesium "minerals" in our dinner). Waste=Food. Materials are then not created and then thrown away, they are constructed, broken down and re-constructed in an sustainable, wasteless circuit. Traditional recycling, on the other hand, is mere "downcycling" because the papers and plastics that are recycled become lower and lower quality with each recycling until they are useless and are thrown into landfills anyway. The recycling process itself is often more polluting that simply making a new plastic bottle. Why not make goods that can be created, destroyed, and then recreated, without any waste? Why not design them that way from the start? It saves materials, and therefore money. The trees are happy, and so are the accountants.

Watch him speak to the TED Conference in 2005: