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Look at how long it's taken us to create what we have today and all we've done efficiency-wise, product-wise, and quality-wise -- all of the things that we as Americans gain comfort in and expect to have available to us. We're doing pretty well. We're in a good place. It's an exciting time to be alive. We can figure out how to maintain our lifestyles and the health of the planet if we do it right. And that's what I want. I don't want to be running around barefoot, pushing my car like Barney Rubble. I don't want to go back to the Stone Age. I just want to maintain what we have for a long period of time -- forever. How nice would that be? I'm very selfish.

William McDonough: The world often sees environmentalism or being green as being less bad. It's really not about being less bad, it's about being more good. So I think that's the difference. When all of a sudden you realize that we have to become a creative force, not just a less destructive force. That's a big revelation.

Cameron Diaz: It's a huge revelation. And that is what is so inspiring.

I really think of it as just the way things should be, the natural order of things. It's not about us. We were a successful society before we started building things and using up resources the way we do now. Human beings existed on this planet in harmony and in balance with it. There was a give and take between us and our resources. Now all of a sudden we feel like everything is getting kicked out from underneath us. It's imperative for us to pay attention to what our resources are doing, what we are doing to our resources, and how we are existing on this planet.

If you think of it as taking away something, withholding something, and not having everything that we want, then nobody wants to participate in that. Nobody wants to be a part of it. But the idea of still getting everything that we want, but just doing it in the right way, in a good way -- like you said, not less bad but more good -- that is the real goal.

William McDonough: This is about sharing and having enough to share. It should be a celebration of abundance, instead of anxieties about limits. I think that's really important. In our book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, Michael Braungart and I are not looking at the world and saying, "Oh no, we are running out of everything!" We are looking at it and saying if we are able to recharacterize all the things that we made into perpetual clean products, then we could celebrate the abundance of this material rather than being terrified about what we are going to do if it's diluted.

Cameron Diaz: How do we move into that? To me, that's the creative part.

William McDonough: I think that's one of the important things about this book. It doesn't just say, "Turn off your light bulbs." Or, "You don't need a message machine if you can use voice mail." It's not going to be go without, go without, or cut back, cut back, whatever. The tone is more like, "Isn't it marvelous that voice mail happens to work really well and it's there all the time and therefore another appliance has hit the dust." That's an interesting way to look at it rather than saying people should not buy anything shrill. We ought to do a global search for the word should and the word must and put in can and could. You can do this. Not you must do this. You can, that is the creative act. Must is an instruction. Can is an openness to creativity. So we ought to decide what we can do.

Cameron Diaz: It's exciting to have a book like this where you can flip through and go see what you can do, what you can do instead of what you should have done. And be able to look at it and say, "Okay, there's an option, that's a thing that I can work toward changing my habits of doing on a day-to-day basis." Or even on a one-off, like buying a new pair of sneakers: "I'll have these sneakers forever now that my foot stopped growing. Someday we could find a perfect green shoe. But my best choice now is the ones with the recycled soles. . . ."