2 Human Ecology as a Problem of Ecological Design
Man is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his
foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.
—George Perkins Marsh
The Problem of Human Ecology
Whatever their particular causes, environmental problems all share
one fundamental trait: with rare exceptions they are unintended,
unforeseen, and sometimes ironic side effects of actions arising from
other intentions.1 We intend one thing and sooner or later get something
very different. We intended merely to be prosperous and
1. Our ecological troubles have been variously attributed to Judeo-Christian
religion (White 1967), our inability to manage common property resources
healthy but have inadvertently triggered a mass extinction of other
species, spread pollution throughout the world, and triggered climatic
change—all of which undermines our prosperity and health. Environmental
problems, then, are mostly the result of a miscalibration
between human intentions and ecological results, which is to say that
they are a kind of design failure.
The possibility that ecological problems are design failures is perhaps
bad news because it may signal inherent flaws in our perceptual
and mental abilities. On the other hand, it may be good news. If our
problems are, to a great extent, the result of design failures, the obvious
solution is better design, by which I mean a closer fit between
human intentions and the ecological systems where the results of our
intentions are ultimately played out.
The perennial problem of human ecology is how different cultures
provision themselves with food, shelter, energy, and the means
of livelihood by extracting energy and materials from their surroundings
(Smil 1994). Ecological design describes the ensemble of technologies
and strategies by which societies use the natural world to
construct culture and meet their needs. Because the natural world is
continually modified by human actions, culture and ecology are shifting
parts of an equation that can never be solved. Nor can there be
one correct design strategy. Hunter-gatherers lived on current solar
income. Feudal barons extracted wealth from sunlight by exploiting
serfs who farmed the land.We provision ourselves by mining ancient
sunlight stored as fossil fuels. The choice is not whether or not human
societies have a design strategy, but whether that strategy works ecologically
and can be sustained within the regenerative capacity of the
particular ecosystem. The problem of ecological design has become
more difficult as the human population has grown and technology
has multiplied. It is now the overriding problem of our time, affecting
virtually all other issues on the human agenda. How and how intelligently
we weave the human presence into the natural world will re-
such as ocean fisheries (Hardin 1968), lack of character (Berry 1977), gender
imbalance (Merchant 1980), technology run amuck (Mumford 1974), disenchantment
(Berman 1989), the loss of sensual connection to nature (Abram
1996), exponential growth (Meadows 1998), and flaws in the economic system
(Daly 1996).
duce or intensify other problems having to do with ethnic conflicts,
economics, hunger, political stability, health, and human happiness.
At the most basic level, humans need 2,200–3,000 calories per
day, depending on body size and activity level. Early hunter-gatherers
used little more energy than they required for food. The invention of
agriculture increased the efficiency with which we captured sunlight
permitting the growth of cities (Smil 1991, 1994). Despite their differences,
neither hunter-gatherers nor farmers showed much ecological
foresight. Hunter-gatherers drove many species to extinction, and
early farmers left behind a legacy of deforestation, soil erosion, and
land degradation. In other words, we have always modified our environments
to one degree or another, but the level of ecological damage
has increased with the level of civilization and with the scale and kind
of technology.
The average citizen of the United States now uses some 186,000
calories of energy each day, most of it derived from oil and coal (Mc-
Kibben 1998). Our food and materials come to us via a system that
spans the world and whose consequences are mostly concealed from
us. On average food is said to have traveled more than 1,300 miles
from where it was grown or produced to where it is eaten (Meadows
1998). In such a system, there is no conceivable way that we can
know the human or ecological consequences of eating. Nor can we
know the full cost of virtually anything that we purchase or discard.
We do know, however, that the level of environmental destruction has
risen with the volume of stuff consumed and with the distance it is
transported. By one count we waste more than 1 million pounds of
materials per person per year. For every 100 pounds of product, we
create 3,200 pounds of waste (Hawken 1997, 44). Measured as an
“ecological footprint” (i.e., the land required to grow our food,
process our organic wastes, sequester our carbon dioxide, and provide
our material needs), the average North American requires some 5
hectares of arable land per person per year (Wackernagel and Rees
1996). But at the current population level, the world has only 1.2
hectares of useable land per person. Extending our lifestyle to everyone
would require the equivalent of two additional earths!
Looking ahead, we face an imminent collision between a growing
population with rising material expectations and ecological capacity.
At some time in the next century, given present trends, the human
population will reach or exceed 10 billion, perhaps as many as 15–20
percent of the species on earth will have disappeared forever, and the
effects of climatic change will be fully apparent. This much and more
is virtually certain. Feeding, housing, clothing, and educating another
4–6 billion people and providing employment for an additional 2–4
billion without wrecking the planet in the process will be a considerable
challenge. Given our inability to meet basic needs of one-third of
the present population, there are good reasons to doubt that we will
be able to do better with the far larger population now in prospect.
The Default Setting
The regnant faith holds that science and technology will find a way to
meet human needs and desires without our having to make significant
changes in our philosophies, politics, economics, or in the way
we live. Rockefeller University professor Jessie Ausubel, for example,
asserts that
after a very long preparation, our science and technology are
ready also to reconcile our economy and the environment.
. . . In fact, long before environmental policy became conscious
of itself, the system had set decarbonization in
motion. A highly efficient hydrogen economy, landless agriculture,
industrial ecosystems in which waste virtually disappears:
over the coming century these can enable large, prosperous
human populations to co-exist with the whales and
the lions and the eagles and all that underlie them. (Ausubel
1996, 15)
We have, Ausubel states, “liberated ourselves from the environment.”
This view is similar to that of futurist Herman Kahn when he
asserted several decades ago that by the year 2200 “humans would
everywhere be rich, numerous, and in control of the forces of nature”
(Kahn and Brown 1976, 1). In its more recent version, those believing
that we have liberated ourselves from the environment cite advances
in energy use, materials science, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence
that will enable us to do much more with far less and eventually
transcend ecological limits altogether. Humanity will then take
control of its own fate, or more accurately, as C. S. Lewis once ob-
served, some few humans will do so, purportedly acting on behalf of
all humanity ([1947] 1970).
Ausubel’s optimism coincides with the widely held view that we
ought to simply take over the task of managing the planet (Scientific
American 1989). In fact, the technological and scientific capability is
widely believed to be emerging in the technologies of remote sensing,
geographic information systems, computers, the science of ecology
(in its managerial version), and systems engineering. The problems of
managing the earth, however, are legion. For one, the word “management”
does not quite capture the essence of the thing being proposed.
We can manage, say, a 747 because we made it. Presumably, we know
what it can and cannot do even though they sometimes crash for reasons
that elude us. Our knowledge of the earth is in no way comparable.
We did not make it, we have no blueprint of it, and we will never
know fully how it works. Second, the target of management is not
quite what it appears to be since a good bit of what passes for managing
the earth is, in fact, managing human behavior. Third, under the
guise of objective neutrality and under the pretext of emergency,
management of the earth is ultimately an extension of the effort to
dominate people through the domination of nature. And can we trust
those presuming to manage to do so with fairness, wisdom, foresight,
and humility, and for how long?
Another, and more modest, possibility is to restrict our access to
nature rather like a fussy mother in bygone days keeping unruly children
out of the formal parlor. To this end Martin Lewis (1992) proposes
what he calls a “Promethean environmentalism” that aims to
protect nature by keeping us away from as much of it as possible. His
purpose is to substitute advanced technology for nature. This requires
the development of far more advanced technologies, more unfettered
capitalism, and probably some kind of high-tech virtual simulation to
meet whatever residual needs for nature that we might retain in this
Brave New World. Lewis dismisses the possibility that we could become
stewards, ecologically competent, or even just a bit more humble.
Accordingly, he disparages those whom he labels “eco-radicals,”
including Aldo Leopold, Herman Daly, and E. F. Schumacher, who
question the role of capitalism in environmental destruction, raise issues
about appropriate scale, and disagree with the directions of technological
evolution. Lewis’s proposal to protect nature by removing
humankind from it raises other questions. Will people cut off from
nature be sane? Will people who no longer believe that they need nature
be willing, nonetheless, to protect it? If so, will people no longer
in contact with nature know how to do so? And was it not our efforts
to cut ourselves off from nature that got us into trouble in the first
place? On such matters Lewis is silent.
Despite pervasive optimism, there is a venerable tradition of unease
about the consequences of unconstrained technological development,
from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Lewis Mumford’s (1974)
critique of the “megamachine.” But the technological juggernaut that
has brought us to our present situation, nonetheless, remains on track.
We have now arrived, in Edward O.Wilson’s (1998) view, at a choice
between two very different paths of human evolution. One choice
would aim to preserve “the physical and biotic environment that cradled
the human species” along with those traits that make us distinctively
human. The other path, based on the belief that we are now
exempt from the “iron laws of ecology that bind other species,” would
take us in radically different directions, as “Homo proteus or ‘shapechanger
man’” (ibid., 278). But how much of the earth can we safely
alter? How much of our own genetic inheritance should we manipulate
before we are no longer recognizably human? This second path,
in Wilson’s view, would “render everything fragile” (ibid., 298). And,
in time, fragile things break apart.
The sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul, is even more pessimistic.
“Our machines,” he writes, “have truly replaced us.”We have
no philosophy of technology, in his view, because “philosophy implies
limits and definitions and defined areas that technique will not allow”
(1990, 216). Consequently, we seldom ask where all of this is going,
or why, or who really benefits. The “unicity of the [technological] system,”
Ellul believes, “may be the cause of its fragility” (1980, 164).We
are “shut up, blocked, and chained by the inevitability of the technical
system,” at least until the self-contradictions of the “technological
bluff,” like massive geologic fault lines, give way and the system dissolves
in “enormous global disorder” (1990, 411–412). At that point
he thinks that we will finally understand that “everything depends on
the qualities of individuals” (ibid., 412).
The dynamic is by now familiar. Technology begets more technology,
technological systems, technology-driven politics, technologydependent
economies, and finally, people who can neither function
nor think a hair’s breadth beyond the limits of one machine or an-
other. This, in Neil Postman’s (1992) view, is the underlying pattern
of Western history as we moved from simple tools, to technocracy, to
“technopoly.” In the first stage, tools were useful to solve specific
problems but did not undermine “the dignity and integrity of the culture
into which they were introduced” (ibid., 23). In a technocracy
like England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, factories undermined
“tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual and religion.”
The third stage, technopoly, however, “eliminates alternatives to itself
in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World.” It
does so “by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by
politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our
definitions fit its new requirements” (ibid., 48). Technopoly represents,
in Postman’s view, the cultural equivalent of AIDS, which is to
say a culture with no defense whatsoever against technology or the
claims of expertise (ibid., 63). It flourishes when the “tie between information
and human purpose has been severed” (ibid., 70).
The course that Ausubel and others propose fits into this larger
pattern of technopoly that step by step is shifting human evolution in
radically different directions. Ausubel (1996) does not discuss the
risks and unforeseen consequences that accompany unfettered technological
change. These, he apparently believes, are justifiable as unavoidable
costs of what he deems to be progress. This is precisely the
kind of thinking that has undermined our capacity to refuse technologies
that add nothing to our quality of life. A system that
produces automobiles and atom bombs will also go on to make supercomputers,
smart weapons, genetically altered crops, nanotechnologies,
and eventually machines smart enough to displace their creators.
There is no obvious stopping point, which is to say that, having accepted
the initial premises of technopoly, the powers of control and
good judgment are eroded away in the flood of possibilities.
Advertised as the essence of rationality and control, the technological
system has become the epitome of irrationality in which
means overrule careful consideration of ends. A rising tide of unanticipated
consequences and “normal accidents” mock the idea that experts
are in control or that technologies do only what they are intended
to do. The purported rationality of each particular component
in what Wilson (1998, 289) calls a “thickening web of prosthetic devices”
added together as a system lacks both rationality and coherence.
Nor is there anything inherently human or even rational about
words such as “efficiency,” “productivity,” or “management,” that are
used to justify technological change. Rationality of this narrow sort
has been “as successful—if not more successful—at creating new degrees
of barbarism and violence as it has been at imposing reasonable
actions” (Saul 1993, 32). Originating with Descartes and Galileo, the
foundations of the modern worldview were flawed from the beginning.
In time, those seemingly small and trivial errors of perception,
logic, and heart cascaded into a rising tide of cultural incoherence,
barbarism, and ecological degradation. Ausubel’s optimism notwithstanding,
this tide will continue to rise until it has finally drowned
every decent possibility that might have been unless we choose a
more discerning course.
Ecological Design
The unfolding problems of human ecology are not solvable by repeating
old mistakes in new and more sophisticated and powerful
ways. We need a deeper change of the kind Albert Einstein had in
mind when he said that the same manner of thought that created
problems could not solve them (quoted in McDonough and Braungart
1998, 92).We need what architect Sim van der Ryn and mathematician
Stewart Cowan define as an ecological design revolution.
Ecological design in their words is “any form of design that minimize(
s) environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself
with living processes . . . the effective adaptation to and integration
with nature’s processes” (1996, x, 18). For landscape architect Carol
Franklin, ecological design is a “fundamental revision of thinking and
operation” (1997, 264). Good design does not begin with what we
can do, but rather with questions about what we really want to do
(Wann 1996, 22). Ecological design, in other words, is the careful
meshing of human purposes with the larger patterns and flows of the
natural world and the study of those patterns and flows to inform
human actions (Orr 1994, 104).
In their book Natural Capitalism (1999), Paul Hawken, Hunter
Lovins, and Amory Lovins propose a transformation in energy and resource
efficiency that would dramatically increase wealth while using
a fraction of the resources we currently use. Transformation would
not occur, however, simply as an extrapolation of existing technologi-
cal trends. They propose, instead, a deeper revolution in our thinking
about the uses of technology so that we don’t end up with “extremely
efficient factories making napalm and throwaway beer cans” (Benyus
1997, 262). In contrast to Ausubel, the authors of Natural Capitalism
propose a closer calibration between means and ends. Such a world
would improve energy and resource efficiency by perhaps tenfold. It
would be powered by highly efficient, small-scale, renewable energy
technologies distributed close to the point of end-use. It would protect
natural capital in the form of soils, forests, grasslands, oceanic fisheries,
and biota while preserving biological diversity. Pollution, in any
form, would be curtailed and eventually eliminated by industries designed
to discharge no waste. The economy of that world would be
calibrated to fit ecological realities. Taxes would be levied on things
we do not want such as pollution and removed from things such as income
and employment that we do want. These changes signal a revolution
in design that draws on fields as diverse as ecology, systems
dynamics, energetics, sustainable agriculture, industrial ecology, architecture,
landscape architecture, and economics.2
The challenge of ecological design is more than simply an engineering
problem of improving efficiency; it is the problem of reducing
the rates at which we poison ourselves and damage the world. The
revolution that van der Ryn and Cowan (1996) propose must first reduce
the rate at which things get worse (coefficients of change) but
eventually change the structure of the larger system. As Bill McDonough
and Michael Braungart (1998) argue, we will need a second industrial
revolution that eliminates the very concept of waste. This implies,
as McDonough is fond of saying, “putting filters on our minds,
not at the end of pipes.” In practice, the change McDonough proposes
2. The roots of ecological design can be traced back to the work of Scottish
biologist D’Arcy Thompson and his magisterial On Growth and Form, first
published in 1917. In contrast to Darwin’s evolutionary biology, Thompson
traced the evolution of life forms back to the problems that elementary physical
forces such as gravity pose for individual species. His legacy is an evolving
science of forms evident in evolutionary biology, biomechanics, and architecture.
Ecological design is evident in the work of Bill Browning, Herman Daly,
Paul Hawken, Wes Jackson, Aldo Leopold, Amory and Hunter Lovins, John
Lyle, Bill McDonough, Donella Meadows, Eugene Odum, Sim van der Ryn,
and David Wann.
implies, among other things, changing manufacturing systems to
eliminate the use of toxic and cancer-causing materials and developing
closed-loop systems that deliver “products of service,” not products
that are eventually discarded to air, water, and landfills.
The pioneers in ecological design begin with the observation that
nature has been developing successful strategies for living on earth for
3.8 billion years and is, accordingly, a model for
• Farms that work like forests and prairies
• Buildings that accrue natural capital like trees
• Waste water systems that work like natural wetlands
• Materials that mimic the ingenuity of plants and animals
• Industries that work more like ecosystems
• Products that become part of cycles resembling natural
materials flows.
Wes Jackson (1985), for example, is attempting to redesign agriculture
in the Great Plains to mimic the prairie that once existed there.
Paul Hawken (1993) proposes to remake commerce in the image of
natural systems. The new field of industrial ecology is similarly attempting
to redesign manufacturing to reflect the way ecosystems
work. The new field of “biomimicry” is beginning to transform industrial
chemistry, medicine, and communications. Common spiders, for
example, make silk that is ounce for ounce five times stronger than
steel, with no waste by-products. The inner shell of an abalone is far
tougher than our best ceramics (Benyus 1997, 97). By such standards,
human industry is remarkably clumsy, inefficient, and destructive.
Running through each of these ideas is the belief that the successful
design strategies, tested over the course of evolution, provide the
standard to inform the design of commerce and the large systems that
supply us with food, energy, water, and materials, and remove our
wastes (Benyus 1997).
The greatest impediment to an ecological design revolution is
not, however, technological or scientific, but rather human. If intention
is the first signal of design, as McDonough puts it, we must
reckon with the fact that human intentions have been warped in recent
history by violence and the systematic cultivation of greed, selfpreoccupation,
and mass consumerism. A real design revolution will
have to transform human intentions and the larger political, eco-
nomic, and institutional structure that permitted ecological degradation
in the first place. A second impediment to an ecological design
revolution is simply the scale of change required in the next few
decades. All nations, but starting with the wealthiest, will have to:
• Improve energy efficiency by a factor of 5–10
• Rapidly develop renewable sources of energy
• Reduce the amount of materials per unit of output by a
factor of 5–10
• Preserve biological diversity now being lost everywhere
• Restore degraded ecosystems
• Redesign transportation systems and urban areas
• Institute sustainable practices of agriculture and forestry
• Reduce population growth and eventually total population
levels
• Redistribute resources fairly within and between generations
• Develop more accurate indicators of prosperity, wellbeing,
health, and security.
To avoid catastrophe, all of these steps must be well under way within
the next few decades. Given the scale and extent of the changes required,
this is a transition for which there is no historical precedent.
The century ahead will test, not just our ingenuity, but our foresight,
wisdom, and sense of humanity as well.
The success of ecological design will depend on our ability to cultivate
a deeper sense of connection and obligation without which few
people will be willing to make even obvious and rational changes in
time to make much difference. We will have to reckon with the
power of denial, both individual and collective, to block change.We
must reckon with the fact that we will never be intelligent enough to
understand the full consequences of our actions, some of which will
be paradoxical and some evil. We must learn how to avoid creating
problems for which there is no good solution, technological or otherwise
(Dobb 1996; Hunter 1997) such as the creation of long-lived
wastes, the loss of species, or toxic waste flowing from tens of thousands
of mines. In short, a real design revolution must aim to foster a
deeper transformation in human intentions and the political and economic
institutions that turn intentions into ecological results. There is
no clever shortcut, no end-run around natural constraints, no magic
bullet, and no such thing as cheap grace.
The Intention to Design
Designing a civilization that can be sustained ecologically and one
that sustains the best in the human spirit will require us to confront
the wellsprings of intention, which is to say, human nature. Our
intentions are the product of many factors, at least four of which have
implications for our ecological prospects. First, with the certain
awareness of our mortality, we are inescapably religious creatures.
The religious impulse in us works like water flowing up from an artesian
spring that will come to the surface in one place or another. Our
choice is not whether we are religious or not as atheists would have it,
but whether the object of our worship is authentic or not. The gravity
mass of our nature tugs us to create or discover systems of meaning
that places us in some larger framework that explains, consoles,
offers grounds for hope, and, sometimes, rationalizes. In our age, nationalism,
capitalism, communism, fascism, consumerism, cyberism,
and even ecologism have become substitutes for genuine religion. But
whatever the -ism or the belief, in one way or another we will create
or discover systems of thought and behavior that give us a sense of
meaning and belonging to something larger. Moreover, there is good
evidence to support the claim that successful resource management
requires, in E. N. Anderson’s words, “a direct, emotional religiously
‘socialized’ tie to the resources in question” (1996, 169). Paradoxically,
however, societies with much less scientific information than
we have often make better environmental choices. Myth and religious
beliefs, which we regard as erroneous, have sometimes worked
better to preserve environments than have decisions based on scientific
information administered by presumably rational bureaucrats
(Lansing 1991). Accordingly, solutions to environmental problems
must be designed to resonate at deep emotional levels and be ecologically
sound.
Second, despite all of our puffed up self-advertising as Homo
sapiens, the fact is that we are limited, if clever, creatures. Accordingly,
we need a more sober view of our possibilities. Real wisdom is
rare and rarer still if measured ecologically. Seldom do we foresee the
ecological consequences of our actions. We have great difficulty understanding
what Jay Forrester (1971) once called the “counterintuitive
behavior of social systems.”We are prone to overdo what worked
in the past, with the result that many of our current problems stem
from past success carried to an extreme. Enjoined to “be fruitful and
multiply,” we did as commanded. But at 6 billion and counting, it
seems that we lack the gene for enough.We are prone to overestimate
our abilities to get out of self-generated messes. We are, as someone
put it, continually overrunning our headlights. Human history is in
large measure a sorry catalog of war and malfeasance of one kind or
another. Stupidity is probably as great a factor in human affairs as intelligence.
All of which is to say that a more sober reading of human
potentials suggests the need for a fail-safe approach to ecological design
that does not overtax our collective intelligence, foresight, and
goodness.
Third, quite possibly we have certain dispositions toward the environment
that have been hardwired in us over the course of our evolution.
E. O. Wilson, for example, suggests that we possess what he
calls “biophilia,” meaning an innate “urge to affiliate with other forms
of life” (1984, 85). Biophilia may be evident in our preference for certain
landscapes such as savannas and in the fact that we heal more
quickly in the presence of sunlight, trees, and flowers than in biologically
sterile, artificially lit, utilitarian settings. Emotionally damaged
children, unable to establish close and loving relationships with people,
sometimes can be reached by carefully supervised contact with
animals. And after several million years of evolution, it would be surprising
indeed were it otherwise. The affinity for life described by
Wilson and others, does not, however, imply nature romanticism, but
rather something like a core element in our nature that connects us to
the nature in which we evolved and which nurtures and sustains us.
Biophilia certainly does not mean that we are all disposed to like nature
or that it cannot be corrupted into biophobia. But without intending
to do so, we are creating a world in which we do not fit. The
growing evidence supporting the biophilia hypothesis suggests that
we fit better in environments that have more, not less, nature.We do
better with sunlight, contact with animals, and in settings that include
trees, flowers, flowing water, birds, and natural processes than in their
absence. We are sensuous creatures who develop emotional attachment
to particular landscapes. The implication is that we need to
create communities and places that resonate with our evolutionary
past and for which we have deep affection.
Fourth, for all of our considerable scientific advances, our knowledge
of the earth is still minute relative to what we will need to know.
Where are we? The short answer is that despite all of our science, no
one knows for certain. We inhabit the third planet out from a fifthrate
star located in a backwater galaxy.We are the center of nothing
obvious to our science.We do not know whether the earth is just dead
matter or whether it is, in some respects, alive. Nor do we know how
forgiving the ecosphere may be to human insults. Our knowledge of
the flora and fauna of the earth and the ecological processes that link
them is small relative to all that might be known. In some areas, in
fact, knowledge is in retreat because it is no longer fashionable or
profitable. Our practical knowledge of particular places is often considerably
less than that of the native peoples we displaced. As a result,
the average college graduate would flunk even a cursory test on local
ecology, and stripped of technology most would quickly founder.
To complicate things further, the advance of human knowledge is
inescapably ironic. Since the Enlightenment, the goal of our science
has been a more rational ordering of human affairs in which cause and
effect could be empirically determined and presumably controlled.
But after a century of promiscuous chemistry, for example, who can
say how the 100,000 chemicals in common use mix in the ecosphere
or how they might be implicated in declining sperm counts, rising
cancer rates, disappearing amphibians, or behavioral disorders? And
having disrupted global biogeochemical cycles, no one can say with
assurance what the larger climatic and ecological effects will be. Undaunted
by our ignorance, we rush ahead to reengineer the fabric of
life on earth. Maybe scientists will figure it all out. It is more probable,
however, that we are encountering the outer limits of social-ecological
complexity in which cause and effect are widely separated in
space and time, and in a growing number of cases no one can say with
certainty what causes what. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, every answer
generated by science gives rise to a dozen more questions, and
every technological solution gives rise to even more problems. Rapid
technological change intended to rationalize human life tends to expand
the domain of irrationality. At the end of the bloodiest century
in history, the Enlightenment faith in human rationality seems overstated
at best. But the design implication is not less rationality, but a
more complete, humble, and ecologically solvent rationality that
works over the long term.
Who are we? Conceived in the image of God? Perhaps. But for
the time being the most that can be said with assurance is that, in an
evolutionary perspective, humans are a precocious and unruly newcomer
with a highly uncertain future. Where are we? Wherever it is,
it is a world full of irony and paradox, veiled in mystery. And for those
purporting to establish the human presence in the world in a manner
that is ecologically sustainable and spiritually sustaining, the ancient
idea that God (or the gods) mocks human intelligence should never
be far from our thoughts.
Ecological Design Principles
As creatures more ignorant than knowledgeable, what principles can
safely guide our actions over the long term? There is no operating
manual for planet Earth, so we will have to write our own as a set of
design principles. Ecological design, however, is not so much about
how to make things as about how to make things that fit gracefully
over long periods of time in a particular ecological, social, and cultural
context. Industrial societies, in contrast, work under the conviction
that “if brute force doesn’t work, you’re not using enough of it.” But
when humans have designed with ecology in mind, there is greater
harmony between intentions and the particular places in which those
intentions are played out that preserves diversity both cultural and
biological; utilizes current solar income; creates little or no waste; accounts
for all costs; and respects larger cultural and social patterns.
Ecological design is not just a smarter way to do the same old things
or a way to rationalize and sustain a rapacious, demoralizing, and unjust
consumer culture. The problem is not how to produce ecologically
benign products for the consumer economy, but how to make
decent communities in which people grow to be responsible citizens
and whole people who do not confuse what they have with who they
are. The larger design challenge is to transform a wasteful society into
one that meets human needs with elegant simplicity. Designing ecologically
requires a revolution in our thinking that changes the kinds
of questions we ask from how can we do the same old things more efficiently
to deeper questions such as:
• Do we need it?
• Is it ethical?
• What impact does it have on the community?
• Is it safe to make and use?
• Is it fair?
• Can it be repaired or reused?
• What is the full cost over its expected lifetime?
• Is there a better way to do it?
The quality of design, in other words, is measured by the elegance
with which we join means and worthy ends. In Wendell Berry’s felicitous
phrase, good design “solves for pattern,” thereby preserving the
larger patterns of place and culture and sometimes this means doing
nothing at all (1981, 134–145). In the words of John Todd, the aim is
“elegant solutions predicated on the uniqueness of place.”3 Ecological
design, then, is not simply a more efficient way to accommodate desires;
it is the improvement of desire and all of those things that affect
what we desire.
Ecological design is as much about politics and power as it is
about ecology.We have good reason to question the large-scale plans
to remodel the planet that range from genetic engineering to attempts
to reengineer the carbon cycle. Should a few be permitted to
redesign the fabric of life on the earth? Should others be permitted to
design machines smarter than we are that might someday find us to
be an annoyance and discard us? Who should decide how much of nature
should be remodeled, for whose convenience, and by what standards?
In an age when everything seems possible, where are the citizens
or spokespersons for other members of biotic community who
will be affected? The answer is that they are now excluded. At the
heart of the issue of design, then, are procedural questions that have
to do with politics, representation, and fairness.
It follows that ecological design is not so much an individual art
practiced by individual designers as it is an ongoing negotiation between
a community and the ecology of particular places. Good design
3. The phrase by John Todd is from a personal communication; see also John
and Nancy Todd, From Eco-Cities to Living Machines: Principles of Ecological
Design (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1994).
results in communities in which feedback between action and subsequent
correction is rapid, people are held accountable for their actions,
functional redundancy is high, and control is decentralized. In a
well-designed community, people would know quickly what’s happening,
and if they don’t like it, they know who can be held accountable
and can change it. Such things are possible only where livelihood,
food, fuel, and recreation are, to a great extent, derived locally;
where people have control over their own economies; and where the
pathologies of large-scale administration are minimal. Moreover,
being situated in a place for generations provides long memory of the
place and hence of its ecological possibilities and limits. There is a
kind of long-term learning process that grows from the intimate experience
of a place over time. Ecological design, then, is a large idea
but is most applicable at a relatively modest scale. The reason is not
that smallness or locality has any necessary virtue, but that human
frailties limit what we are able to comprehend and foresee, as well as
the scope and consistency of our affections. No amount of smartness
or technology can dissolve any of these limits. The modern dilemma
is that we find ourselves trapped between the growing cleverness of
our science and technology and our seeming incapacity to act wisely.
The standard for ecological design is neither efficiency nor productivity
but health, beginning with that of the soil and extending
upward through plants, animals, and people. It is impossible to impair
health at any level without affecting it at other levels. The etymology
of the word “health” reveals its connection to other words such as
healing, wholeness, and holy. Ecological design is an art by which we
aim to restore and maintain the wholeness of the entire fabric of life
increasingly fragmented by specialization, scientific reductionism,
and bureaucratic division.We now have armies of specialists studying
bits and pieces of the whole as if these were separable. In reality it is
impossible to disconnect the threads that bind us into larger wholes
up to that one great community of the ecosphere. The environment
outside us is also inside us.We are connected to more things in more
ways than we can ever count or comprehend. The act of designing
ecologically begins with the awareness that we can never entirely
fathom those connections. This means that humans must act cautiously
and with a sense of our fallibility.
Ecological design is not reducible to a set of technical skills. It is
anchored in the faith that the world is not random but purposeful and
stitched together from top to bottom by a common set of rules. It is
grounded in the belief that we are part of the larger order of things
and that we have an ancient obligation to act harmoniously within
those larger patterns. It grows from the awareness that we do not live
by bread alone and that the effort to build a sustainable world must
begin by designing one that first nourishes the human spirit.
Finally, the goal of ecological design is not a journey to some
utopian destiny, but is rather more like a homecoming. Philosopher
Suzanne Langer once described the problem in these words: “Most
people have no home that is a symbol of their childhood, not even a
definite memory of one place to serve that purpose. Many no longer
know the language that was once their mother-tongue. All old symbols
are gone. . . . The field of our unconscious symbolic orientation is
suddenly plowed up by the tremendous changes in the external world
and in the social order” ([1942] 1976, 292). In other words, we are
lost and must now find our way home again. For all of our technological
accomplishments, the twentieth century was the most brutal and
destructive era in our short history. In the century ahead we must
chart a different course that leads to restoration, healing, and wholeness.
Ecological design is a kind of navigation aid to help us find our
bearings again. And getting home means recasting the human presence
in the world in a way that honors ecology, evolution, human dignity,
spirit, and the human need for roots and connection.
Conclusion
Ecological design is far more than the application of instrumental reason
and advanced technology applied to the problems of shoehorning
billions more of us into an earth already bulging at the seams with
people. Humankind, as Abraham Heschel once wrote, “will not perish
for want of information; but only for want of appreciation . . . what we
lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder” ([1951] 1990, 37).
The ultimate object of ecological design is not the things we make but
rather the human mind and specifically its capacity for wonder and
appreciation.
The capacity of the mind for wonder, however, has been diminished
by the tacit design of the systems that provide us with food, energy,
materials, shelter, health care, entertainment, and by those that
remove our voluminous wastes from sight and mind. There is little in
these industrial systems that fosters mindfulness or ecological competence,
let alone a sense of wonder. On the contrary, these systems are
designed to generate cash, which has itself become an object of wonder
and reverence. It is widely supposed that formal education serves
as some kind of antidote to this uniquely modern form of barbarism.
But conventional education, at its best, merely dilutes the tidal wave
of false and distracting information embedded in the infrastructure
and processes of technopoly. However well intentioned, formal education
cannot compete with the larger educational effects of highways,
shopping malls, supermarkets, urban sprawl, factory farms,
agribusiness, huge utilities, multinational corporations, and nonstop
advertising that teaches dominance, power, speed, accumulation, and
self-indulgent individualism. We may talk about how everything is
ecologically connected, but the terrible simplifiers are working overtime
to take it all apart.
If it is not to become simply a more efficient way to do the same
old things, ecological design must become a kind of public pedagogy
built into the structure of daily life. There is little sense in only selling
greener products to a consumer whose mind is still pre-ecological.
Sooner or later that person will find environmentalism inconvenient,
or incomprehensible, or too costly and will opt out. The goal is to calibrate
human behavior with ecology, which requires a public that understands
ecological possibilities and limits. To that end we must
begin to see our houses, buildings, farms, businesses, energy technologies,
transportation, landscapes, and communities in much the same
way that we regard classrooms. In fact, they instruct in more fundamental
ways because they structure what we see, how we move,
what we eat, our sense of time and space, how we relate to each
other, our sense of security, and how we experience the particular
places in which we live. More important, by their scale and power
they structure how we think, often limiting our ability to imagine
better alternatives.
When we design ecologically, we are instructed continually by
the fabric of everyday life: pedagogy informs infrastructure, which in
turn informs us. Growing food on local farms and gardens, for example,
becomes a source of nourishment for the body and instruction in
soils, plants, animals, and cycles of growth and decay (Donahue
1999). Renewable energy technologies become a source of energy as
well as insight about the flows of energy in ecosystems. Ecologically
designed communities become a way to teach about land use, landscapes,
and human connections. Restoration of wildlife corridors and
habitats instructs us in the ways of animals. In other words, ecological
design becomes a way to expand our awareness of nature and our ecological
competence.
Most important, when we design ecologically we break the addictive
quality that permeates modern life. “We have,” in the words
of Bruce Wilshire, “encase(d) ourselves in controlled environments
called building and cities. Strapped into machines, we speed from
place to place whenever desired, typically knowing any particular
place and its regenerative rhythms and prospects only slightly” (1998,
18).We have alienated ourselves from “nature that formed our needs
over millions of years [which] means alienation within ourselves”
(ibid.). Given our inability to satisfy our primal needs, we suffer what
Wilshire calls a “deprivation of ecstasy” that stemmed from the 99
percent of our life as a species spent fully engaged with nature. Having
cut ourselves off from the cycles of nature, we find ourselves
strangers in an alien world of our own making. Our response has been
to create distractions and addictive behaviors as junk food substitutes
for the totality of body-spirit-mind nourishment we’ve lost and then
to vigorously deny what we’ve done. Ecstasy deprivation, in other
words, results in surrogate behaviors, mechanically repeated over and
over again, otherwise known as addiction. This is a plausible, even
brilliant, argument with the ring of truth to it.
Ecological design is the art that reconnects us as sensuous creatures
evolved over millions of years to a beautiful world. That world
does not need to be remade but rather revealed. To do that, we do not
need research as much as the rediscovery of old and forgotten things.
We do not need more economic growth as much as we need to relearn
the ancient lesson of generosity, as trustees for a moment between
those who preceded us and those who will follow. Our greatest
needs have nothing to do with the possession of things but rather
with heart, wisdom, thankfulness, and generosity of spirit. And these
virtues are part of larger ecologies that embrace spirit, body, and
mind—the beginning of design.