Rainbow Grocery is a vegetarian food store that has been serving San Francisco and the Bay Area since 1975. While they strive to offer the widest selection of organic and locally sourced products at the most affordable price, they also hope to be a resource for our community to exchange information about the health and sustainability of the foods we put on our tables. As a worker-owned cooperative, those who work there are more than simply the labor-force of this business, they are the business. And while they have come to work there for many different reasons, they all share the common desire to work in a non-hierarchical, democratic workplace where everyone’s opinion matters. Not only do they hope to make a difference by providing healthy food and products to everyone who shops with them, they believe that through their successful business model for cooperative work they are also putting the ideals of sustainable living into practice. Since they moved from 15th and Mission to their building at 13th and Folsom, they have more than doubled their workforce from about 85 people to over 220. While they add new worker/owners every year, some of them are celebrating their 20th, 25th, even 30 year anniversaries! Rainbow is more than just a job for its employees. coque iphone x And their hope for you, is that the store is more than just a place to find healthy food! Rainbow Grocery Cooperative is committed to being a positive presence in our community, both economically and ecologically. Each year they give donations to local non-profits, social justice organizations, schools and artists. coque iphone 8 They actively support the development of cooperatives and collectives that bring living wage jobs and democratic workplaces to the Bay Area. They regularly donate their time to local fairs and community events. In an effort to minimize their footprint on the planet, they recycle and compost as much of their waste as possible, while drawing on the sun’s rays for energy. New Café Rainbow Grocery is proud to announce the addition of a cafe attached to our Native Plant Garden. They have worked with Stumptown Coffee Roasters to learn how to brew their highest quality (and most ethically grown) beans with the most delicious results possible. They offer brewed coffee as well as a variety of espresso drinks off our beautiful La Marzocco espresso machine. An unparalleled selection of teas from their large Bulk Tea selection are available. coque iphone 6 They use Strauss organic whole milk in all steamed drinks and offer Califia cold-pressed almond milk as a non-dairy alternative. coque iphone 2019 The menu includes fresh baked pastries from Starter Bakery. coque iphone New additions will be added to the menu in the future! Cafe hours: Monday – Saturday 8am – 6pm. Sunday 9am – 6 pm.
Sustainability
William McDonough
William McDonough is an adviser, designer, thought leader, and author. Trained as an architect, his interests and influence range widely, and he works at scales from the global to the molecular. He is recognized globally as a leader in sustainable development. His vision for a future of abundance for all is helping companies and communities think differently. Together they are changing the world.
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William McDonough is a globally recognized leader in sustainable development. Trained as an architect, Mr. McDonough’s interests and influence range widely, and he works at scales from the global to the molecular.
Time magazine recognized him as a “Hero for the Planet,” noting: “His utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that—in demonstrable and practical ways—is changing the design of the world.” In 1996, Mr. McDonough received the Presidential Award for SustainableDevelopment, and in 2003 he earned the first U.S. EPA Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award for his work with Shaw Industries. In 2004, he received the National Design Award for exemplary achievement in the field of environmental design. Mr. McDonough is the architect of many of the recognized flagships of sustainable design, including the Ford Rouge truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan; the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College; and NASA’s “space station on Earth,” Sustainability Base, one of the most innovative facilities in the federal portfolio.
Mr. McDonough has written and lectured extensively on design as the first signal of human intention. He was commissioned in 1991 to write The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability as guidelines for the City of Hannover’s EXPO 2000, still recognized two decades after publication as a touchstone of sustainable design. In 2002, McDonough and the German chemist Dr. Michael Braungart co-authored
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which is widely acknowledged as a seminal text of the sustainability movement. Their much-anticipated new book, The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability–Designing for Abundance was released in 2013.
Mr. McDonough advises commercial and governmental leaders worldwide through McDonough Innovation. He is also active with William McDonough + Partners, his architecture practice with offices in Charlottesville, VA, and San Francisco, CA, as well as MBDC, the Cradle to Cradle consulting firm co-founded with Dr. Braungart. He has co-founded, with Braungart, not-for-profit organizations to allow public accessibility to Cradle to Cradle thinking. These include GreenBlue (2000), to convene industry groups around Cradle to Cradle issues, and the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute (2009), founded at the invitation of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to create a global standard for the development of safe and healthy products. Mr. McDonough also co-founded Make It Right (2006) with Brad Pitt to bring affordable Cradle to Cradle-inspired homes to the New Orleans Lower 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina.
On Design: The Hannover Principles
From the 20th anniversary printing—
November 2012
As an architect and designer, I am someone who spends time thinking about how we can imagine a future of abundance for our children. In 1991, at the suggestion of Dr. Michael Braungart, I was commissioned by the City of Hannover, Germany, to craft sustainable design principles for Expo 2000, The World’s Fair. The result was The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability, which was officially presented by Hannover as a gift to the 1992 Earth Summit’s World Urban Forum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
If design is the first signal of human intention, our intention today can be to love all ten billion people who will live on our planet by 2050. We can do this. If we imagine and embrace our cities as part of the same organism as the countryside, the rivers and the oceans, then we can celebrate ourselves, all species and the natural systems we support and that support us. This is our design assignment. If we are principled and have positive goals, we can rise to this occasion. It will take us all; it will take forever—that is the point.
—William McDonough
THE HANNOVER PRINCIPLES
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Insist on rights of humanity and nature to co-exist in a healthy, supportive, diverse and sustainable condition.
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Recognize interdependence. The elements of human design interact with and depend upon the natural world, with broad and diverse implications at every scale. Expand design considerations to recognizing even distant effects.
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Respect relationships between spirit and matter. Consider all aspects of human settlement including community, dwelling, industry and trade in terms of existing and evolving connections between spiritual and material consciousness.
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Accept responsibility for the consequences of design decisions upon human well-being, the viability of natural systems and their right to co-exist.
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Create safe objects of long-term value. Do not burden future generations with requirements for maintenance or vigilant administration of potential danger due to the careless creation of products, processes or standards.
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Eliminate the concept of waste. Evaluate and optimize the full life-cycle of products and processes, to approach the state of natural systems, in which there is no waste.
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Rely on natural energy flows. Human designs should, like the living world, derive their creative forces from perpetual solar income. Incorporate this energy efficiently and safely for responsible use.
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Understand the limitations of design. No human creation lasts forever and design does not solve all problems. Those who create and plan should practice humility in the face of nature. Treat nature as a model and mentor, not as an inconvenience to be evaded or controlled.
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Seek constant improvement by the sharing of knowledge. Encourage direct and open communication between colleagues, patrons, manufacturers and users to link long term sustainable considerations with ethical responsibility, and re-establish the integral relationship between natural processes and human activity.
The Hannover Principles should be seen as a living document committed to the transformation and growth in the understanding of our interdependence with nature, so that they may adapt as our knowledge of the world evolves.
From the 2002 10th Anniversary Edition—
INTRODUCTION, by Teresa Heinz
I first became aware of William McDonough’s work in 1984, when he redesigned the national headquarters of the Environmental Defense Fund. The redesign of the EDF office was a watershed event. Not only was it the first “green” office in New York City, it also laid the foundation for a new design philosophy: a commercially productive, socially beneficial and ecologically intelligent approach to the making of things that Bill and his colleague Michael Braungart would come to call eco-effectiveness.
When I hired Bill to design the Heinz family offices and Heinz Foundation offices in Pittsburgh in 1991, he and Michael had just been commissioned by the City of Hannover to develop a set of design principles for the 2000 World’s Fair. Having chosen “Humanity, Nature and Technology” as the theme of the fair, the city wanted to showcase hopeful visions for a sustainable future. The Hannover Principles were to put forth an inspiring standard, presenting to the world the first coherent framework for rethinking design through the lens of sustainability.
Getting to know Bill and Michael as colleagues and friends over the last ten years has given me the opportunity to see firsthand the impact of the Hannover Principles. From their elegant insistence on “the rights of humanity and nature to co-exist” to their call to “eliminate the concept of waste,” the Principles echo the deep human instinct—and wisdom—to care for the world. Indeed, they have become a cultural touchstone, providing information and grounding not just for the design community but also for all those devoted to bringing forth a world of social equity, environmental health and peaceful prosperity.
At their core is a simple truth: Human health, the strength of our economy and the well-being of our environment are all connected. I learned this lesson early in life, as a child growing up in Mozambique. In the East Africa of my youth, the interplay of nature, health and survival was a given, something that people who lived close to the natural world intuitively understood. For me, that understanding was reinforced by having a father who was a doctor. Observing him and the questions he asked of his patients taught me how illness can be related to environment and the practices of daily life.
We lived in a place where nature’s laws of cause and effect were fairly clear. If you went swimming at sunrise or sunset, feeding time for sharks and river crocodiles (and indeed, for all the animals in the savannah), you might get a nasty nibble. We learned to respect the rules of the natural world because they had such obvious implications for people’s personal well-being. Nature taught us the virtues of prevention—of solving problems by not creating them in the first place.
Industrialized societies tend to be less in touch with nature’s rules. In the nineteenth century, the paradigm was that we should tame nature; in the twentieth, it became a sense that we are almost immune to its rules. Today, we tend to think of the natural world as somehow separate, an entity “out there” that can be controlled, held at bay or even ignored. Even our efforts to protect the environment have been informed by this “us versus it” mentality, a sense that we are in competition with the natural world and that the best we can hope for is to mitigate the damage we cause.
The simple genius behind the nine Hannover Principles was that they reframed the issue. Rather than take a certain amount of ecological harm as a given, with people on various sides of the environmental debate reduced to arguing over the permissible amount, Bill and Michael invited us to consider an alternative. Why not just design products and institutions that support the environment, they asked?
The Hannover Principles were the first expression of that transforming idea. In nine lean declarations they set forth a value system and a design framework that Bill and Michael continue to use as the foundation of their evolving design paradigm. As they write in Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, nature’s cycles are not just lean and efficient; they are abundant, effective and regenerative. By going beyond mere efficiency to celebrate the abundance of nature, the practice of eco-effective, cradle-to-cradle design allows us to create materials, dwellings, workplaces, and commercial enterprises that generate not fewer negative impacts but more productivity, more pleasure and more restorative effects.
The key insight of eco-effective or cradle-to-cradle thinking is recognizing the materials of our daily lives—even highly technical, synthetic industrial materials—as nutrients that can be designed to circulate in human systems very much like nitrogen, water, and simple sugars circulate in nature’s nutrient cycles. Rather than using materials once and sending them to the landfill—our current cradle-to-grave system—cradle-to-cradle materials are designed to be returned safely to the soil or to flow back to industry to be used again and again.
Far more than a theoretical notion, this central principle of sustainability can be readily seen in the work of Bill’s architectural firm, William McDonough + Partners, and Bill and Michael’s industrial design consultancy, McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry. Working with clients ranging from small companies like the Swiss textile mill Rohner to global megacorporations like the Ford Motor Company, both firms are showing that designers attuned to this cradle-to-cradle philosophy can replicate nature’s closed-loop systems in the worlds of commerce and community. The result: safe, beneficial materials that either naturally biodegrade or provide high-quality resources for the next generation of products; buildings designed to produce more energy than they consume; cities and towns tapped into local energy flows; places in every human realm that renew a sense of participation in the landscape.
My own hopes for the urban landscapes of Pittsburgh brought The Hannover Principles home, literally. At the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, where the Principles were introduced to the international community, I invited Bill and Michael to come to Pittsburgh to share their ideas. Both were invited to lecture at Carnegie Mellon University and, as I had hoped, the Hannover Principles became a part of the dialogue going on in Pittsburgh at the time about the region’s environmental future.
Today, Pittsburgh is gaining national recognition as a leader in green building and sustainable design. In many ways, that began with the building of the Heinz family offices, which represented the first, commercial-scale use of sustainably harvested tropical wood. Our offices served as a laboratory and model for others to learn from, and not just locally. The Discovery Channel covered it; architectural magazines wrote about it; and builders, designers and architects from across the country came to study its features. Since then, the ideas articulated in the Hannover Principles have never been far from the minds of the staff at The Heinz Endowments as they have advanced our green building agenda in Pittsburgh over the past decade.
Those ideas are making communities from Pittsburgh to Chicago and from Shanghai to Barcelona better places to live. They are helping people create buildings and landscapes where natural processes unfold with renewed vitality. They are transforming product design and shaping the work of such influential companies and institutions as Ford, Nike, BASF, the University of California, the Woods Hole Research Center and Oberlin College. As more and more companies and institutions adopt these sustaining principles, there is also the chance that the global economy as a whole will begin to find robust health and long-term strength through the practice of intelligent design.
Ultimately, that is the enduring value of The Hannover Principles and the reason why this tenth anniversary edition is as fresh and necessary as ever. The Principles urge us to start seeing ourselves as part of the natural world and to replicate the joyful, productive and intelligent practice of life itself.
Find the original 1992 edition here— Hannover Principles 1992
The New Facts of Life, Part 1
A discussion of the interrelations between food, health, and the environment is extremely topical today. In part one of this three part essay we’ll discuss Ecological Literacy.
Rising food prices together with the price of oil and a series of so-called “natural” catastrophes dominate the news every day. At the same time, there is a lot of confusion. Why are world food prices increasing so quickly and dramatically? Why is world hunger rising again after a long steady decline? What do
food prices have to do with the price of oil? Why is it so important to grow food locally and organically? In this brief talk, I shall try to show that a full understanding of these issues requires a new ecological understanding of life (a new “ecological literacy”) as well as a new kind of “systemic” thinking – thinking in terms of relationships, patterns, and context.
Indeed, over the last 25 years, such a new understanding of life has emerged at the forefront of science. I want to illustrate this new understanding by asking the age-old question, what is life? What’s the difference between a rock and a plant, animal, or microorganism? To understand the nature of life, it is not enough to understand DNA, proteins, and the other molecular structures that are the building blocks of living organisms, because these structures also exist in dead organisms, for example, in a dead piece of wood or bone.
The difference between a living organism and a dead organism lies in the basic process of life – in what sages and poets throughout the ages have called the “breath of life.” In modern scientific language, this process of life is called “metabolism.” It is the ceaseless flow of energy and matter through a network of chemical reactions, which enables a living organism to continually generate, repair, and perpetuate itself. In other words, metabolism involves the intake, digestion, and transformation of food.
Metabolism is the central characteristic of biological life. But understanding metabolism is not enough to understand life. When we study the structures, metabolic processes, and evolution of the myriads of species on the planet, we notice that the outstanding characteristic of our biosphere is that it has sustained life for billions of years. How does the Earth do that? How does nature sustain life?
Ecological literacy
To understand how nature sustains life, we need to move from biology to ecology, because sustained life is a property of an ecosystem rather than a single organism or species. Over billions of years of evolution, the Earth’s ecosystems have evolved certain principles of organization to sustain the web of life. Knowledge of these principles of organization, or principles of ecology, is what we mean by “ecological literacy.”
In the coming decades, the survival of humanity will depend on our ecological literacy – our ability to understand the basic principles of ecology and to live accordingly. This means that ecoliteracy must become a critical skill for politicians, business leaders, and professionals in all spheres, and should be the most important part of education at all levels – from primary and secondary schools to colleges, universities, and the continuing education and training of professionals.
We need to teach our children, our students, and our corporate and political leaders, the fundamental facts of life – that one species’ waste is another species’ food; that matter cycles continually through the web of life; that the energy driving the ecological cycles flows from the sun; that diversity assures resilience; that life, from its beginning more than three billion years ago, did not take over the planet by combat but by networking.
All these principles of ecology are closely interrelated. They are just different aspects of a single fundamental pattern of organization that has enabled nature to sustain life for billions of years. In a nutshell: nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities. No individual organism can exist in isolation. Animals depend on the photosynthesis of plants for their energy needs; plants depend on the carbon dioxide produced by animals, as well as on the nitrogen fixed by bacteria at their roots; and together plants, animals, and microorganisms regulate the entire biosphere and maintain the conditions conducive to life.
Sustainability, then, is not an individual property but a property of an entire web of relationships. It always involves a whole community. This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature. The way to sustain life is to build and nurture community. A sustainable human community interacts with other communities – human and nonhuman – in ways that enable them to live and develop according to their nature. Sustainability does not mean that things do not change. It is a dynamic process of co-evolution rather than a static state.
The New Facts of Life, Part 2
A discussion of the interrelations between food, health, and the environment is extremely topical today. In part two of this three part essay we’ll discuss Systems Thinking.
to read part one click here
Systems thinking
The fact that ecological sustainability is a property of a web of relationships means that in order to understand it properly, in order to become ecologically literate, we need to learn how to think in terms of relationships, in terms of interconnections, patterns, context. In science, this type of thinking is known as systemic thinking or “systems thinking.” It is crucial for understanding ecology, because ecology – derived from the Greek word oikos (“household”) – is the science of relationships among the various members of the Earth Household.
Systems thinking emerged from a series of interdisciplinary dialogues among biologists, psychologists, and ecologists, in the 1920s and ’30s. In all these fields, scientists realized that a living system – organism, ecosystem, or social system – is an integrated whole whose properties cannot be reduced to those of smaller parts. The “systemic” properties are properties of the whole, which none of its parts have. So, systems thinking involves a shift of perspective from the parts to the whole. The early systems thinkers coined the phrase, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts.”
What exactly does this mean? In what sense is the whole more than the sum of its parts? The answer is: relationships. All the essential properties of a living system depend on the relationships among the system’s components. Systems thinking means thinking in terms of relationships. Understanding life requires a shift of focus from objects to relationships.
For example, each species in an ecosystem helps to sustain the entire food web. If one species is decimated by some natural catastrophe, the ecosystem will still be resilient if there are other species that can fulfill similar functions. In other words, the stability of an ecosystem depends on its biodiversity, on the complexity of its network of relationships. This is how we can understand stability and resilience by understanding the relationships within the ecosystem.
Understanding relationships is not easy for us, because it is something that goes counter to the traditional scientific enterprise in Western culture. In science, we have been told, things need to be measured and weighed. But relationships cannot be measured and weighed; relationships need to be mapped. So there is another shift: from measuring to mapping.
In biology, a recent dramatic example of this shift happened in the Human Genome Project. Scientists became acutely aware that, in order to understand the functioning of genes it is not enough to know their sequence on the DNA; we need to be able to also map their mutual relationships and interactions.
Now, when you map relationships, you will find certain configurations that occur repeatedly. This is what we call a pattern. Networks, cycles, feedback loops, are examples of patterns of organization that are characteristic of life. Systems thinking involves a shift of perspective from contents to patterns.
I also want to emphasize that mapping relationships and studying patterns is not a quantitative but a qualitative approach. Systems thinking implies a shift from quantity to quality. A pattern is not a list of numbers but a visual image.
The study of relationships concerns not only the relationships among the system’s components, but also those between the system as a whole and surrounding larger systems. Those relationships between the system and its environment are what we mean by context.
For example, the shape of a plant, or the colors of a bird, depend on their environment – on the vegetation, climate, etc. – and also on the evolutionary history of the species, on the historical context. Systems thinking is always contextual thinking. It implies a shift from objective knowledge to contextual knowledge.
Finally, we need to understand that living form is more than a shape, more than a static configuration of components in a whole. There is a continual flow of matter through a living system, while its form is maintained; there is development, and there is evolution. The understanding of living structure is inextricably linked to the understanding of metabolic and developmental processes. So, systems thinking includes a shift of emphasis from structure to process.
All these shifts of emphasis are really just different ways of saying the same thing. Systems thinking means a shift of perception from material objects and structures to the nonmaterial processes and patterns of organization that represent the very essence of life.
This essay is adapted from a speech Fritjof Capra delivered at a professional development institute, “Linking Food, Health, and the Environment,” hosted by the Center for Ecoliteracy and Teachers College Columbia University in the summer of 2008.
The New Facts of Life, Part 3
A discussion of the interrelations between food, health, and the environment is extremely topical today. In part three of this three part essay we’ll discuss Current World Problems.
Current world problems
Once we become ecologically literate, once we understand the processes and patterns of relationships that enable ecosystems to sustain life, we will also understand the many ways in which our human civilization, especially since the Industrial Revolution, has ignored these ecological patterns and processes and has interfered with them. And we will realize that these interferences are the fundamental causes of many of our current world problems.
It is now becoming more and more evident that the major problems of our time cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are all interconnected and interdependent. One of the most detailed and masterful documentations of the fundamental interconnectedness of world problems is the new book by Lester Brown, Plan B (Norton, 2008). Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute, demonstrates in this book with impeccable clarity how the vicious circle of demographic pressure and poverty leads to the depletion of resources – falling water tables, wells going dry, shrinking forests, collapsing fisheries, eroding soils, grasslands turning into desert, and so on – and how this resource depletion, exacerbated by climate change, produces failing states whose governments can no longer provide security for their citizens, some of whom in sheer desperation turn to terrorism.
Virtually all our environmental problems are threats to our food security – falling water tables; increasing conversion of cropland to non-farm uses; more extreme climate events, such as heat waves, droughts, and floods; and, most recently, increasing diversion of grains to biofuel.
A critical factor in all this is the fact that world oil production is reaching its peak. This means that, from now on, oil production will begin to decrease worldwide, extraction of the remaining oil will be more and more costly, and hence the price of oil will continue to rise. Most affected will be the oil-intensive segments of the global economy, in particular the automobile, food, and airline industries.
The search for alternative energy sources has recently led to increased production of ethanol and other biofuels, especially in the United States, Brazil, and China. And since the fuel-value of grain is higher on the markets than its food-value, more and more grain is diverted from food to producing fuels. At the same time, the price of grain is moving up toward the oil-equivalent value. This is one of the main reasons for the recent sharp rise of food prices. Another reason, of course, is that a petrochemical, mechanized, and centralized system of agriculture is highly dependent on oil and will produce more expensive food as the price of oil increases. Indeed, industrial farming uses 10 times more energy than sustainable, organic farming.
The fact that the price of grain is now keyed to the price of oil is only possible because our global economic system has no ethical dimension. In such a system, the question, “Shall we use grain to fuel cars or to feed people?” has a clear answer. The market says, “Let’s fuel the cars.”
This is even more perverse in view of the fact that 20 percent of our grain harvest will supply less than 4 percent of automotive fuel. Indeed, the entire ethanol production in this country could easily be replaced by raising average fuel efficiency by 20 percent (i.e. from 21 mpg to 25 mpg), which is nothing, given the technologies available today.
The recent sharp increase in grain prices has wreaked havoc in the world’s grain markets, and world hunger is now on the rise again after a long steady decline. In addition, increased fuel consumption accelerates global warming, which results in crop losses in heat waves that make crops wither, and from the loss of glaciers that feed rivers essential to irrigation. When we think systemically and understand how all these processes are interrelated, we realize that the vehicles we drive, and other consumer choices we make, have a major impact on the food supply to large populations in Asia and Africa.
All these problems, ultimately, must be seen as just different facets of one single crisis, which is largely a crisis of perception. It derives from the fact that most people in our society, and especially our political and corporate leaders, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world.
The main message of Lester Brown’s Plan B, is that there are solutions to the major problems of our time; some of them even simple. But they require a radical shift in our perceptions, our thinking, our values. And, indeed, we are now at the beginning of such a fundamental change of worldview, a change of paradigms as radical as the Copernican Revolution. Systems thinking and ecological literacy are two key elements of the new paradigm, and very helpful for understanding the interconnections between food, health, and the environment, but also for understanding the profound transformation that is needed globally for humanity to survive.
This essay is adapted from a speech Fritjof Capra delivered at a professional development institute, “Linking Food, Health, and the Environment,” hosted by the Center for Ecoliteracy and Teachers College Columbia University in the summer of 2008.