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Early in the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson went to Europe on a sailboat and returned on a steamship.

Emerson went on a solar-powered recyclable craft operated by men practicing an ancient art in the open air. He returned in a steel rust-bucket that took on water and put smoke in the sky and was operated by people working in the dark shoveling fossil fuels into the mouths of boilers.

William McDonough, an architect who was named "Hero of the Planet" by Time Magazine, reminded a group of about 250 attentive listeners at the Palo Alto City Council chambers that "we are still designing steamships."

"On any given day when the sun is shining and you are inside a building illuminated by electric light causing the production of nuclear isotopes, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxide, you should think, 'I am in a steamship. I am in the dark,'" McDonough said. "We need a new design. We need a boat for Thoreau."

McDonough's talk is the third in a series for the City addressing sustainability issues. In 1996, he received the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development, the nation's highest environmental honor. In calling him a hero of the planet, Time hailed McDonogh's "unified philosophy that is changing the design of the world,"

McDonough used the boat as a metaphor for a design assignment of what he called the "Next Industrial Revolution."

"From the perspective as a designer, the ship designed during the First Industrial Revolution is going down," McDonough said. "Regulation is a signal of design failure.

"The design assignment of the next Industrial Revolution does not require regulations to stop us from killing one another too quickly, measures progress by how many buildings have no smokestacks… produces nothing that will require future generations to maintain vigilance and live in terror."

McDonough defines sustainability as "Loving all children, all species, all the time." The goals of his designs are a balance among equality, economy and ecology.

"The concept of the Declaration of Independence is life, liberty and pursuit of happiness free from remote tyranny," McDonough said. "In Jefferson's case, the remote tyranny referred to the King of the England, George III. Now seven generations later, we realize that some of the remote tyranny future generations will suffer is us."

Not until 1973 with the passage of the Endangered Species Act did people take responsibility for giving other living species the right to exit, McDonough said.

"How do we find ourselves in kinship with nature, with all living things on the planet?" McDonough asked. Since 1977, McDonough has been a leader in the "green building" movement, where a building can produce oxygen like a tree and a city can produce energy like a forest.

In his 1997 Gap campus in San Bruno, the roofs are planted with native grasses and wildflowers atop six inches of soil that both feeds the birds and acts as a thermal and acoustical insulator. With solar panels and huge atriums introducing sunlight deep into the building, the building is 30 percent more energy efficient than state law requires. In his 1996 Prairie Project, he restored forests near the Mississippi River where 40 species that had not been seen for a half century years returned to the forest.

McDonough also proved that with and sustainability could be applied not only on architecture but also on almost every product. He has cooperated with Nike to develop soles that dissolve into nutrients for the soil. He has created fabric that can be used as mulch for local garden clubs and helped factories develop filters that make waste water cleaner than the water that went into the factory.

"Waste equals food," McDonough said. "We used to be able to throw things away. Where is 'away?' There is no 'away.' 'Away' is here. 'Away' is someone's backyard. We need to design things that can go into the organic cycle, the cradle-to-cradle life cycle."