Wired's Paul Spinrad noted that Paolo Soleri while reading Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and Hunter Lovins enjoyed the reference to muda, a Japanese term for wastefulness.
Soleri in one of School of Thought said:
"I believe that much of our development today is muda. We are Homo faber before we are Homo sapiens, meaning we build before we reason. And our capacity to create and transform things is a blessing and a curse. Now we're living through the early phase of silicon culture, where we have ability without discrimination - so it's understandable that productivity is high and we're making anything we can sell. But the whole process is one of growth, and I hope and expect we will begin growing with more wisdom."
Muda Paolo Soleri takes the idea of Muda from the book Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins. Muda is a Japanese word and it refers to garbage. But it refers to more than just garbage it is how some Japanese how redefined how they look at not only waste but wasteful practices and lifestyles in a more holistic way. Because of tax breaks and subsidies, it is cheaper to extract raw materials from the earth than recycle. Of course the cost to the environment of pollution stem from the production of industrial materials is not figured in to the cost of production, therefore our booming economy is a false one, since it gives us the image of prosperity without accounting for the devastation levied on important life sustaining ecosystems around the world.
As there emerges a greater understanding of the discipline called ecological economics, a greater and more educated group of consumers (the cultural creatives) and a greater appreciation of more accurate cost accounting practices that determine how we are affecting the environment, there will be an increasing movement toward industrial ecology.
There are several industrial facilities or industrial parks--in the US--which use these integrated principals of combining industries that figure out how to use other factories wastes and byproducts in a way similar to that which sustains the balance and cyclical dynamic of natural systems.
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From Wired Online Magazine's Paul Spinrad: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.05/streetcred_pr.html