BY SCOTT HARPER
The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk)
February 19, 1996
DESIGNING THE FIRST solar home in Ireland as a 23-year-old
graduate student at Yale was just a start. William A. McDonough,
now the dean of architecture at the University of Virginia, is thinking
bigger these days. A lot bigger.
Without batting an eye, McDonough talks matter-of-factly about
changing the industrialized world - the whole western world. No
more pollution. No more toxic chemicals. No more environmental
regulations. No kidding.
''What's going on is a revolution,'' he says with a disarming
confidence one recent afternoon at his campus office. ''Two years from
now, people will turnaround and say, 'What happened?' ''
McDonough, 44, is becoming a leading voice among a growing
number of environmental scientists, engineers, academics,
entrepreneurs and, of course, architects, who believe their work is
pushing society to the cusp of a second industrial revolution.
Known as ''sustainable development'' or '' industrial ecology, '' the
movement is rooted in the advance of clean technologies that produce
quality goods and jobs without smothering Mother Nature under a
blanket of fossil fuels,smoke and hazardous wastes.
But McDonough is proudly more radical than many of his
contemporaries, who include Vice President Al Gore, author of a best-
selling book on the coming environmental age. While some colleagues
accept a small amount of waste and ecological damage, the ''Green
Dean,'' as McDonough is playfully known on campus, believes the
only goals worth setting are zero pollution and total recycling.
''A company that reduces its toxic pollution by 80 percent is still a
toxic polluter,'' he says. ''We're still designing our cars, our ships and
our factories to put oil in the boiler and smoke into the sky. We need a
completely new design.''....
To some political conservatives and industry groups, however,
sustainable development is just liberal jargon meaning more
government control of business.
In literature from groups lobbying Congress for relaxed
environmental rules, the concept is dismissed and mistrusted. Its
axiom that nature is endangered is flatly rejected. Groups sardonically
note that the environment has recovered throughout history from far
worse injury than pollution - namely, volcanoes, ice ages, continental
shifts and earthquakes.
''The claim that the Earth cannot support the life it spawns is
perhaps the most arrogant assertion of pseudo-knowledge than can be
expressed by a human,'' writes the property-rights group
Environmental Conservation Organization in its national newsletter.
McDonough chuckles at such criticism. ''I'm the most conservative
person you'll meet,'' he says. ''I don't believe in government control
either. It doesn't work.''
He especially likes what the Dutch government asked of its
industries in 1990. Faced with mounting environmental problems
after years of heavy-handed regulation, government officials offered
industrial leaders a deal: Find a way to stop polluting and we'll stop
bothering you.
''Aren't regulations really the legalization to kill something
slowly?''McDonough asks. ''What we seem to be saying is, if you're
going to pollute a river, do it slowly. It's ridiculous.''
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