Foreward

On a warm and breezy day in Los Angeles, award-winning architect William McDonough, a Time magazine "Hero for the Planet," visited Cameron Diaz's home to talk about this book, their individual "green" awakenings, and their common outlook on the world.

William McDonough: I was born in Tokyo. And I remember lying on my back on a futon at 2 o'clock in the morning in a Japanese house with paper walls, listening to the fountains and the koi out there. Listening, you could hear what they called the honey wagons come and collect all the sewage from the latrines and then go off to the farms in the middle of the night. You'd hear the whole city rumbling with carts taking out the sewage. Then in the morning you'd hear all the carts coming back in with tofu. That's what you'd have for breakfast, tofu. So you would remember, "Out went the waste, in came the food." I thought that's the way the world worked: that out went the waste and in came the food.

Then I went to Hong Kong. In a way, I lived in the future because I lived in a place with six million people on 400-square miles. When we look at what cities in the middle of this century are going to be like, they will be located on large bodies of water, and the crowding will be amazing. Eighty percent of the world's population and 80 percent of the world's cities will be megacities like this. Hong Kong was the future megacity. There, people were dying of all sorts of diseases and starvation. It was terrible. This was just after the Communists took over in China, and all the refugees had gone to Hong Kong. We had four hours of water every fourth day. So the idea that you would save water is not unnatural to me. To brush your teeth, you would use a glass that you had saved water in for three days.

I had a whole childhood of this, things like that. My grandparents lived in a log cabin on the Puget Sound and raised oysters, composted, and recycled aluminum foil and put away vegetables for the winter. Then I went to Westport, Connecticut, for public high school, and it was all American stuff. It blew my mind. The guys left the showers running in the gym -- hot water -- and just walked right out. They didn't care. They just went out and hopped in their cars and roared away. I've never seen so much waste in my whole life. It made me an outcast because I was in high school and I'd be running around turning off the water. They thought I was a bit odd.

Then when I was at Yale -- I started Yale for graduate school in 1973 as an architecture student -- we had the first oil crisis. So all of sudden it was sort of like, "Wait a minute, we've got to deal with this now."

Cameron Diaz: My grandmother raised her own livestock in her backyard, her own vegetables in her backyard. And it was just here in the Valley next to Glendale, next to where the California Pizza Kitchen is right now. It was a different era and a different mentality. She raised her first four children there.

I watched my grandmother reuse tinfoil and plastic bags. And when she was finished with a loaf of bread, she kept that plastic bag and she would use it for something. She would make soap out of the fat drippings off of the meat she cooked. Nothing went to waste. Everything was reused and recycled. So I had that as an example.

I don't think that example exists for the generation right now. My grandmother lived a true sustainable existence. Everything she took from the land, she put back. Everything that she put back, she would take out again. It was a continuous cycle. And I witnessed that, and I was influenced a lot by that. My mother was influenced by that, and she passed it on to me. We need to be the examples now.

I never got into the environmental movement [before] because I really didn't connect to what was being said and how it was being said. I'm a selfish American. I don't want to give it all up. But at the same time, I found that I was already practicing the basics, everything from recycling to composting to saving energy to hybrid cars. I had been pursuing those things myself without knowing that they were part of the movement. Then I started listening more closely to what was being said because I was looking for a way in. I wanted to do more than what I was doing just for myself. I wanted to help other people do more.

What grabbed me about Bill is that he is a creative person. It isn't like his ideas are so far out that you can't grasp them. They all made perfect sense to me. And it was being said in a way that you don't want to be less bad. You don't want to be slapped on the back of the hand. You want to be productive. And that's how you get things done. That's what makes people respond. It isn't about cutting everything out. It is about creating something better. And that's something that I think is inspiring and something that brought me into the environmental movement. Nobody has all the answers right now. Yet every day we get closer to another answer. It may not be the answer to everything, 'cause that doesn't come. There is no one thing that we can all do that will make it all better. It's about making the best choices that are available.