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A Couch, a Crescendo, or Both?
A sofa on a curb. No big deal; life changes, we get new things and discard old ones. Sending furniture to a landfill is considered a benign activity. Why? Who says? When is it time to revisit the merits of old assumptions? Who’s job is that? What if instead of just a sofa on a curb, it is really a window into an enormous system playing out all around us. It’s like background music that we’re so used to we can’t hear it anymore. That noise we can’t hear is the sound of extraction: take natural resources for lowest cost. Take human labor pay lowest price. Turn into goods for…
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Creative Destruction and What to Do with What’s Left Behind…
Creative destruction often describes innovation and business cycles. How we buy and listen to music has undergone massive creative destruction over the last several decades: vinyl records lost to cassette players which lost to CDs which lost to digital files. As a result, record players are considered obsolete technology; however, what about this real wooden furniture? Is that obsolete? Should it be, just because it’s attached to a record player? What would a system look like that supported creating value out of what’s left behind? We need to focus on value creation, which leads to growing markets, jobs, reducing pressure on natural resources and more prosperity than burying things…
