Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things

Michael Braungart is a co-author of the book and a German chemist. He has been interested in environmentalism and industrialism for over three decades. Although he comes from a family “of literature and philosophy scholars,” Braungart went against the grain “and turned to chemistry” (10). While studying at university, he learned about environmental chemistry. He studied with Professor Friedhelm Korte, a widely instrumental scholar in the field of ecological chemistry.

After graduating from university, Braungart became even more interested in environmental issues: “In 1978 I became one of the founding members of the Green Action Future Party. This became Germany’s Green Party, and its primary goal was taking care of the environment” (10). A pivotal moment in his career came after a massive oil spill in the late 1980s: “I coordinated a protest in which my colleagues and I chained ourselves to Ciba-Geigy smokestacks in Basel” (11). The experience of helping to alleviate the impact of those massive chemical spills in the Rhine gave an urgency to his interest in environmental issues. He is now the director of the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA), an environmental chemistry research agency that works with many large corporations to develop environmentally safe chemicals.

From Henry Ford in the early 1900s to his great-grandson William Clay Ford in the 1990s, many industrialists are profiled throughout the book. As a group, industrialists’ main goals involve increasing efficiency and increasing profit. Industrialists throughout history have been opposed to environmentalist intervention. The two groups are thought of as inherently opposed to one another:

On the other hand, industrialists often view environmentalism as an obstacle to production and growth. For the environment to be healthy, the conventional attitude goes, industries must be regulated and restrained. For industries to fatten, nature cannot take precedence. It appears that these two systems cannot thrive in the same world (6).

The authors take on the idea that industry is intrinsically opposed to the environment and show that this is not the case. They portray the industrialists as not an entirely bad group, despite the devastating problems their decisions have affected upon the environment:

But the general spirit of the early industrialists—and of many others at the time—was one of great optimism and faith in the progress of humankind. As industrialization boomed, other institutions emerged that assisted its rise: commercial banks, stock exchanges, and the commercial press all opened further employment opportunities for the new middle class and tightened the social network around economic growth (21).

The authors are sympathetic to the industrialists in many ways and, throughout the book, the group is portrayed as having made decisions based on the information that was available at the time: “Many industrialists, designers, and engineers did not see their designs as part of a larger system, outside of an economic one” (24).