This is the position. It is assembled from work at four scales, a company that changed hands, and a year and a half of maintaining land that had been designed by better architects than me.
I have tried to name my sources rather than absorb them, and to separate what I have tested from what I have only read. Where an idea is borrowed, it is attributed. Where I am guessing, it says so.
I mean it as a planning exercise, not a slogan. War is the one condition under which societies reliably demonstrate their actual capacity — how fast a factory retools, how quickly a standard is written and enforced, how much of the ordinary economy can be reorganised around a single objective when the alternative is losing.
We are not doing any of that. We are doing pledges, and pledges are a parameter — the weakest place to push on a system.
So the version of the question I can actually act on is the small one. What would I do differently this week, in the work in front of me? The answers are unglamorous and they are all available now: rebuild soil, rebuild community, rebuild structure. Design systems that need less maintenance rather than more attention. Hold standards that keep an investment compounding instead of decaying — and not merely for the sake of the compounding.
Donella Meadows ranked the places you can intervene in a system, weakest to strongest. Twelve is constants, parameters, numbers — subsidies, taxes, standards. Two is the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises. One is the power to transcend paradigms at all.
For seven years I optimised numbers. Lighter body. More watts. Fewer pounds. Better thermal envelope. Every one of those is leverage point twelve, and every one of them made the product genuinely better, and none of them moved the paradigm an inch — while the story I told about the work, publicly and to myself, was a point-two story.
This is the most common failure mode in design and nobody warns you about it. We are trained to make the object excellent. We are not trained to ask whether the object is where the leverage is. An excellent object at point twelve will outperform a mediocre one and change nothing.
The correction is not to abandon objects. It is to be honest about which point you are working at, and to stop borrowing the rhetoric of a higher one.
Bill Zeedyk spent a career restoring degraded watersheds across the Southwest, and his method is the one I trust most out of everything I have encountered.
You read what the water is already trying to do. Then you place very small structures — a rock, a log, a one-rock dam — precisely where they let the water do the rest. Induced meandering. The stream rebuilds its own meander, raises its own water table, and grows its own riparian corridor. You did not build any of that. You removed the reason it could not happen.
Set that against how I built the NS-1, which was an attempt to supply every condition directly: carry your own power, carry your own water, carry your own shelter, carry your own network. Total provision. The opposite instinct.
The land version is cheaper, more durable, and compounds without you. I have come to think that is true of businesses and buildings too, and that most of my early work was expensive because I was supplying conditions instead of creating them.
Stewart Brand's pace layers describe a healthy system as six layers moving at different speeds: fashion, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, nature — quickest at the top, slowest at the bottom. The fast layers innovate and get all the coverage. The slow layers hold everything and get almost none.
Maintaining a campus is a year and a half of being paid to work in the slow layers while everyone's attention is upstairs. Roofs, culverts, wells, roads. Nothing you do is visible unless you fail to do it.
It reorganised how I judge a design. The question is no longer only what does this do — it is which layer does this live in, and does it respect the tempo of the layers underneath it. A product that requires the infrastructure layer to move at commerce speed will break the infrastructure. A business built to consume its people at fashion tempo will consume them.
The corollary is a design rule I now apply everywhere: prefer the intervention that lowers future maintenance over the one that raises future attention.
Putting a satellite dish on the NS-1 removed the last constraint on living anywhere. Power from the sun, water in the tank, shelter on the axle, and the entire internet arriving from orbit. It was, technically, the completion of the thesis.
It also quietly dissolved the thing that made the trailer worth building. The value was never the capability. It was the boundary — a weekend, a canyon, a place where the work could not reach you. Remove the boundary and you have not liberated anybody; you have extended the office to the treeline.
I think this is the central design question of the next twenty years and I do not think it is a nostalgic one. Abundance without discipline is just a faster route to consuming the thing you were trying to reach. The interesting work is no longer in extending capability. It is in designing the constraint back in — deliberately, beautifully, so that it feels like a choice rather than a deprivation.
I believe time outside is transformative, and I would rather ground that in something better than my own preferences.
Rachel and Stephen Kaplan's attention restoration theory distinguishes two kinds of attention: directed attention, which is effortful and depletes, and soft fascination, which natural environments provide almost for free — moving water, wind in trees, weather. The claim is that natural settings let the directed-attention system recover in a way that urban and screen environments do not, and a body of empirical work has followed it since.
That gives a mechanism to something the outdoor industry usually sells as a feeling. It also raises the stake on access: if restoration is a function, then the distribution of quiet land is a public health question, not a lifestyle one.
It is worth saying that the literature is contested in its details. I am citing a mechanism I find persuasive and useful, not a settled result.
Hyperlocalism held inside a global conscience. Know your watershed. Know who grows your food and who fixes your road. Put the loop where you can see both ends of it.
The reasoning is not sentimental. A loop you can see is a loop you will actually close. A loop you cannot see is an offset you are buying from a stranger, and the evidence on those is not good. The circular economy framing I find most useful — eliminate waste and pollution, circulate materials at their highest value, regenerate natural systems — is much easier to verify at the scale of a valley than at the scale of a supply chain.
This is also the answer to the obvious objection to everything above. One person cannot fix a planetary system. One person can absolutely fix a drainage, a building, a company's compensation structure, and the soil on a specific piece of ground — and those are the layers that hold.
The science fiction I grew up on gave me a picture I have never shaken: a desert world, a people who measure water in drops and treat a spilled cup as a moral event, and a terraforming plan held patiently across generations by people who know they will not see it finish.
Strip the story away and what is left is a design brief. Ecology as the central political fact. Discipline about a scarce resource, practised as culture rather than enforced as policy. A plan with a horizon longer than any individual's career, maintained by institutions that expect to hand it on.
We are not organised for that. Our planning horizon is a quarter and our incentive is the next raise. But the thing I keep noticing on restored land is that the timescales are not actually absurd — a healed headcut is a few seasons, a recovering meadow is a few years, a forest is a few decades. The horizon is long by the standards of a funding round and short by the standards of a life.
I am thirty-two years old and I have built one product, one company, and a set of ideas I am still testing. Nothing here is a body of work in the sense the people I learn from have one.
I have not published research. My land experience is a year and a half, not a career, and I was maintaining someone else's design rather than making my own. The circular businesses I describe are mostly unbuilt, and the studio page says so venture by venture.
What I do have is an unusually complete loop for someone my age: I designed a thing, manufactured it, sold it, ran the company around it, watched the thesis fail on contact with real customers, and then spent a year and a half on the maintenance end of buildings learning what my drawings would have cost somebody. Most designers get one or two of those. The argument here is worth what that experience is worth, and not more.
Named rather than absorbed. If you want to argue with the position, these are the load-bearing pieces.
The dream outcome for this page is not agreement. It is somebody — an investor, an employer, a partner, a former colleague — arriving at the bottom of it wanting to argue about one specific claim. That conversation is the most useful thing that could happen to any of it.