Danielle Sacks’ feature on William McDonough continues to be distributed and amplified across the Internet, as many people who were once disciples begin to question the green messiah who may be more clay footed than they had hoped. Note the URL for the story: it seems that there may have been internal editorial debate about the title, and perhaps the side that ceded ground negotiated a more subtle placement of their preferred epithet.

It was picked up February 8th by Jim Gourley on his Absurdity, Allegory and China blog. It is easy to forget when the pitch is one about saving the planet, that it is still a pitch: a sales pitch. And in a pitch that seeks to alter what (green, not brown; solar, not coal; walking, not driving) and who (green guards, not red guards; buyers of green goods, not ordinary goods) is of value, there is money to be made. Part of the great reporting in Sacks’ article is how she demonstrates that many of McDonough’s decisions about how he works to green the world are influenced by pursuit of financial gain at the cost of actually getting healthier products in consumers’ hands (see in particular the Nike case).  This week, Sacks’ reports that McDonough--via MBDC’s cradle-to-cradle certification process--is now certifying individual product ingredients, in addition to the previously available whole product certification program.  Whether this is actually being done to make the process more transparent, or whether it is being done as a way to maximize the payments that can be required for certification is yet to be known. Does anyone have a pricing sheet that compares the cost of whole product certification (before the new service) with the product ingredient certification?

McDonough+Partners also knew that there was money to be made, indirectly through their work in Huangbaiyu, as did McDonough himself. Designing the China’s first ecological, master planned rural community was surely a way to get fame globally, which translates into the offer of more contracts for the firm, and more speaking fees and book sales for McDonough. The financial element of a supposedly philanthropic project wasn’t lost on Dai Xiaolong either, the local salesman that McDonough and his team at the China-US Center for Sustainable Development tapped to lead the construction of Huangbaiyu on the ground. 

Before the first shovel hit the dirt, Dai had claimed to trademark some 6000 marks for “Huangbaiyu” in various industrial or product areas: Huangbaiyu roofing, Huangbaiyu car, Huangbaiyu windows, Huangbaiyu computer...banking on the fact that once Huangbaiyu become a model of green development, he’d be able to sell of rights to the name, and become the rich man he had always dreamed of being.

Unfortunately for both McDonough and Dai, despite a well-crafted media campaign in which they both sought to get Huangbaiyu heralded as the missing link to a green future (see Thomas Friedman’s Addicted to Oil, and PBS’s Design e2), Huangbaiyu is now becoming reported more as a Potempkin village.  There is much to be written about (and I am working on it....) why false facades are held up as successes, despite the damage that a reported “truth” does when it is far separated from the ground of reality. 

It is clear that it is not only the Chinese officials who reported false harvest numbers to Mao that were guilty of such self-serving guile. As Henry Kissinger once observed that “when enough prestige has been invested in a policy it is easier to see it fail than abandon it.” But isn’t that a false choice? Watch it fail while claiming success or abandon it? What about recognizing problems as they develop, researching conditions and responding to them, altering and evolving the project to meet its goals as new information or processes come to light?

Perhaps when a project is held up as a green dream, a utopia, it cannot admit fault. For how can a utopia have errors? And I suppose that is why so many utopic visions end up in catastrophe.