William McDonough Offers a New Language for Carbon
Climate change is the result of breakdowns in the carbon cycle caused by us: it is a design failure. Anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere make airborne carbon a material in the wrong place, at the wrong dose and for the wrong duration. It is we who have made carbon into a toxin—like lead in our drinking water or nitrates in our rivers. In the right place, carbon is a resource and a tool. Let’s recognize carbon as an asset and the life-giving carbon cycle as a model for human designs.