President & CEO Lance Hosey recently delivered a keynote address at the Sustainable Brands 2012 conference on his latest book, The Shape of Green, which was released this past June. In his keynote, Lance makes the case for why beauty is inherent to sustainability and outlines core principles for the aesthetics of sustainable design. You can check out the presentation in its entirety below:
The original version of this video is available on the Sustainable Brands website.
Tag: The Shape of Green
GreenBlue CEO Makes Case for Aesthetics in Sustainable Design with New Book
People often equate environmentally friendly cars, buildings, and products with being unsightly. Yet not only can sustainable design be beautiful, argues author Lance Hosey, its beauty can make it more sustainable.
“Conventional wisdom portrays green as not just occasionally but inevitably unattractive, as if beauty and sustainability were incompatible,” Hosey writes in his new book, The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology and Design (Island Press), out this month. Yet, “long-term value is impossible without sensory appeal, because if design doesn’t inspire, it’s destined to be discarded.”
In his book, Hosey outlines a manifesto for both designers and consumers interested in bridging appearances and doing right by the planet. He identifies three core principles of sustainable design–conservation, attraction and connection–to show how good design and green design can become one and the same. Hosey cites such examples as:
- Cars so aerodynamic they get 80 miles a gallon without new technology;
- Comfortable chairs built from a single piece of plywood;
- Packaging that uses less material while keeping food fresher;
- Electronics so appealing you can’t throw them away; and
- Buildings that adapt to their locations to use a fraction of typical energy needs.
The first book to outline principles for the aesthetics of sustainable design, The Shape of Green does not ask that consumers sacrifice comfort. Rather, it shows how designers can create products that are aesthetically pleasing, environmentally friendly, and enjoyable for years to come. “Can we be as smart about how things look as we are about how they work?” asks Hosey.
Hosey, a nationally recognized architect, designer, and author, is President & CEO of GreenBlue, a nonprofit working to make products more sustainable. Hosey has more than two decades of experience in sustainable design and strategy, and he has worked with some of the world’s leading companies to advance sustainable innovation. Previously he was Director with the renowned pioneer of sustainable design William McDonough + Partners.
“It’s time someone revealed that the oppositions of sustainability vs. style, ethics vs. aesthetics, are false starts. In this book, Lance Hosey helps retire that opposition and shows us what makes beauty and sustainability one and the same.”
—Susan Szenasy, Editor-in-Chief, Metropolis Magazine
Lance Hosey is “an inspirational guide to a future we can’t wait to embrace.”
—John Elkington, co-founder of SustainAbility and founding partner of Volans
With my latest book, The Shape of Green, coming out this summer, a colleague asked me to compile a list of other sustainability-related books I would recommend. Since the usual suspects—Silent Spring, The Ecology of Commerce, Biomimicry, and Cradle to Cradle, etc.—are so well known, there’s no need to repeat them here. Instead, I’ll focus on a more personal list of favorites that have influenced my thinking on sustainability. Below are ten compelling reads that, in their own ways, expand the sustainability dialogue.
The Wooing of Earth, René Dubos (1980). The man who coined the phrase, “Think globally, act locally,” explains that it is not the ethics of environmentalism but, rather, the “visceral and spiritual” power of nature that moves people to action. Ecology and humanism must unite.
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, E. O. Wilson (1999). The famed father of sociobiology declares that sustainability is impossible without breaking down the barriers between the arts and sciences: “Until that fundamental divide is closed or at least reconciled in some congenial manner, the relation between man and the living world will remain problematic.”
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, David Abram (1997). We tend to speak of “the environment” in the singular, as if it’s one homogeneous space, rather than an endless variety of peaks and plains, hills and haddocks. Abram meditates beautifully on how the values of indigenous peoples grew out of the specificity of place—how each worldview evolved from a particular view of the world.
The Sense of Wonder, Rachel Carson (1965). Where Silent Spring was her call to arms, The Sense of Wonder is Carson’s reverie on the joys of immersing oneself in nature. Presaging The Last Child in the Woods by forty years, she writes that such immersion is essential for early education—and for lifelong wisdom.
The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems, Fritjof Capra (1997). An eloquent introduction to “deep ecology”: “The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realize that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.”
Human Nature: A Blueprint for Managing the Earth—By People, For People, James Trefil (2005). A physicist defies conventional wisdom about the environment and celebrates new scientific breakthroughs that promise to solve the challenge of sustainability—by putting people first.
The World Without Us, Alan Weisman (2007). A powerful thought experiment in what would happen if humanity suddenly disappeared. Step by step, Weisman shows how quickly nature would fill the void, which forces us to ask what sustainability is intended to protect—all of the earth, or just us?
Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation, Steven Johnson (2010). Comparing innovation to evolution, Johnson shows how some environments—coral reefs, cities, the World Wide Web—are naturally more conducive to creativity than others are.
Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace, Vandana Shiva (2006). Shiva’s insightful criticism of economic globalization demonstrates how its practices could be antithetical to sustainability.
One World: The Ethics of Globalization, Peter Singer (2004). In the age of global warming, Singer argues, managing natural resources must transcend political boundaries and nation states.
