There have been a lot of really good posts concerning the lack of effort truly being made at DePaul, as well as about the fact that the 'green movement' is not the first time that a lot of environmentally and ecologically based technologies have been around. On page 141 of Massive Change, at the beginning of the Material Economies section, it reads,

"Material has traditionally been something to which design is applied. New methods in the fields of nanotecnology have rendered material as the object of design development. Instead of designing a thing, we design a designing thing. In the process, we have created superhero materials and collapsed the age-old boundary between the image and the object, rendring mutable the object itself."

I think this shows a lot of how we have historically viewed nature and natural

resources, as something to apply our knowledge to, to render it to our will rather than to understand the materials we are working with and use them in a way that will make them better (more durable, stronger, more intelligent) and more like themselves. I am not entirely sure how to do this, but I think it is going to take a lot of letting go of long-standing assumptions that we have concerning production, manufacturing, efficiency, and even the nature of materials themselves. This is going to be tough to do as long we still have a 'more and bigger is better' mentality, because it IS actually going to require a different mode of thinking and a restructuring of our society, not to mention up-front costs. But this idea that if we design specifically for materials involved we will be able to do so much more with them, rather than mold them to our current way of thinking, shows that the possibilities are endless as long as we can actually get people to be open to something new.