David Orr on Ecological Design
from The Nature of Design 2002
- Env. problems are mostly a result of design failure: a miscalibration
between human intentions and eco results
- Problems we've created---species extinction, pollution, climate
change---are unforseen and unintended byproducts of other things we
are doing
- Consider some alternative diagnoses of cause of env. problems:
- Moral, religious, economic, political failures
- Facts about U.S. energy use and waste
- U.S. citizen uses some 186,000 calories of energy each day
- Average food traveled more than 1,300 miles
- Can't know human/ecological consequences of eating
- Or full cost of what we purchase or discard
- 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
- Definition of Ecological Footprint
- Land required to grow our food, process our organic wastes,
sequester our carbon dioxide, provide for our material needs
- Humans have exceeded their ecological footprint
- Average North American, requires 5 hectares of arable land per
person per year
- Current pop levels, world has only 1.2 hectares of useable land
per person
- Extending our lifestyle to everyone would require equivalent of
two additional earths.
- To determine your personal ecological footprint, click here
- https://www.earthday.net/footprint/index.asp#
- Eco design involves
- Reimagine/remake human presence on earth in ways that work over
the long haul (i.e., "sustainability")
- Designing with nature (learn from nature?)
- 3.8 billion years of evolution is record of design strategies and
intelligence we can draw on
- Replacing the current goal of total mastery over nature with the goal
of living harmoniously with nature so as to cause no ugliness (human
or ecological) some other place or time
- Eco design is revolutionary
- Ecologically informed enlightenment will upset comfortable
philosophies that underlie modern world like Enlightenment of 18th
century upset medieval hierarchies of church and monarchy
- Changes will be great, but mostly in ways we will come to regard as
vastly better
- Eco design connected to other human problems
- How intelligently we weave human presence into natural world will
reduce or intensify other problems-ethnic conflicts, economics,
hunger, political stability, health, and human happiness
- Philosophy of eco design involves
- Changing human activity on earth from destruction to participation
- A change in attitude toward nature from autism to competent
reverence
- Autism: absorption in self-centered subjective mental
activity-fantasies, delusions, hallucinations-involving a
marked withdrawal from reality
- We are in denial (given that we think we can go on living this
way)
- Realizing that we are creatures more ignorant than knowledgeable
- Reckon with fact that we will never be intelligent enough to
understand the full consequences of our actions
- Think of the Luddites and Lyons in particular
- A pattern of loyalty and faithfulness to a higher order of being
- Seeing people are embedded in a network of obligation and as kin to
all life
- Critique of industrial age
- Its great conceit is belief that we are exempt from laws that govern
rest of creation
- Nature to be overcome and subordinated
- Focus on endless econ growth, excess consumption, individualism
- Human incompetence: Average college graduate would flunk even a
cursory test on local ecology and stripped of tech, most would quickly
founder
- Our principle of tech: "If brute force doesn't work, you're not using
enough"
- For all of our tech accomplishments, the 20th century was the most
brutal and destructive era in human history
- Ecological Education:
- Power of learning from how our environments constructed (and by
example): Design of cities, transportation, corporations, shopping
malls-more powerful than traditional education in teaching us values and a
view of the world
- Lessons from settled cultures about "arts of longevity" (i.e.,
sustainability")
- We can learn design intelligence from the many settled cultures
on well used landscapes
- Amish: Horse makes it so some things just can't be done; We need a
similar limit on our use of technology
- Place near Dartmoor in England where people have occupied and
used this land competently for 10,000 years
- Bali agriculture based on religious superstition worked and then was
destroyed by imposition of modern agricultural techniques
- Innuit people's acute powers of observation, memory and senses
- Ecological design is a communal, not an individual achievement
- Local culture mediates between human intentions and nature (good
design not result of heroic individuals)
- Instead of individual brilliance, design results from intelligence
deeply embedded in culture
- Eco design requires collective intelligence of a community of people
applied to a particular problem in a particular place over long period
of time
- In short, ecological design is communal
- Traditional cultures work slowly in contrast to frenetic pace of industrial
societies (e.g., "like patient and increasingly skillful lovemaking that
persuades the land to flourish")
- Some aspects of ecological designed communities:
- Self-sustaining
- Today communities are to dependent on events beyond their control
- Decentralized
- Today power is concentrated in too few hands
- Focus on the local rather than global
- "For most of us this 'great work' of our age must begin where we are,
in small acts of everyday life"
- Yet: Green consumerism and greener corporations are band-aid
solutions
- Feedback between action and consequence and subsequent correction
is rapid at the local level
- People held accountable for their actions as they are known
- Specific features of an eco designed world
- Need to eliminate the very concept of waste
- Put filters on our minds, not the end of pipes
- Pollution would be curtailed and eventually eliminated by
industries designed to discharge no waste
- Economy would be calibrated to fit eco realities
- Taxes would be levied on things we do not want-such as pollution
and removed from things we do want: income and employment
- For other specific features, see pp 22-23
- Instead of just automatically designing for increased efficiency we
need to ask these questions of new technology: See pp. 28