3) The Natural Design Movement
Everybody has to be a designer. What we’re calling for is massive creativity. The fundamental issue we’re trying to address is the rightful place of humans in the natural world. How can we go about being part of the natural design? William McDonough (in Suzuki, 1999, p.241)
In March 2005, I presented a paper at the European Academy of Design conference in Bremen,
Germany. It introduced the concept of the ‘natural design movement’ and discussed the relationship between eco-literacy, ethics, and aesthetics within the context of natural design.
The paper proposed: “Eco-literacy – a detailed understanding of nature as a complex interacting, creative process in which humanity participates – results in a shift in perception towards an ecological ethics and aesthetics of participation that considers cultural, social and ecological, as well as economic value” (Wahl, 2005b, p.1). Such an approach tries to optimise human patterns of participation in natural process in such a way that it contributes to the health and sustainability of the overall system.
The Natural Design Movement shares an ecological worldview. The movement unites diverse disciplines ranging from ecological design, industrial and urban ecology, sustainable architecture and bioregional planning to ecological economics, eco-literate education and green politics. Furthermore it considers the philosophical, sociological and psychological implications of the ecological worldview. Design in the 21st century will be grounded in eco-literacy and aspire toward community-based designs that are adapted to the specific conditions of a particular place and culture (Wahl, 2005b, p.1).
The Natural Design Movement encompasses such diverse fields as ecological product-, process- and institutional design, sustainable architecture, community-, urban- and bioregional planning, industrial ecology, and ecological engineering, but also political systems of governance, ecological economics, education for sustainability, renewable resource based technologies and energy production, as well as aspects of bionics, eco-technology, and green chemistry. All of which will be discussed in more detail in chapters four and five. As I have already alluded to in chapter two, the natural design movement is united through a salutogenic intentionality behind design on all scales of the fundamentally interconnected whole in which we participate.
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The perception, preservation and restoration of the condition of systemic health, or dynamic stability, are the underlying strategies of all sustainable designs. Salutogenesis, or health generation at the scale of local and global ecosystems and social systems has to become the priority of design in the 21st Century if we want to create a sustainable global civilization through diverse, locally adapted cultures of co-operation (Wahl, 2005b, pp.15-16).
This chapter suggests that such a design response to the current crisis of unsustainability is already emerging, represented by a diverse, international movement which is as yet not fully integrated and conscious of its own existence. This thesis hopes to facilitate the process of networking that is necessary to unite this trans-disciplinary, scale -linking movement by providing a generalised map of its various contributories.
This chapter begins with a brief history of ecologically conscious design and introduces some of the key visionaries who have prepared the ground for its emergence. It starts with an acknowledgement of the important influence of traditional and indigenous knowledge on appropriate design; and highlights the influence Sir Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford,
Buckminster Fuller, Ian McHarg and Victor Papanek on the natural design movement.
Subchapter two discusses the concept of natural design within the context of the shift in perception facilitated by an ecological worldview. It suggests that a participatory understanding of humanity’s involvement in natural process dissolves the apparent paradox of natural design which itself is simply the result of employing an epistemology of Cartesian dualism.
Subchapter three explores the relationship between ecological literacy, an expanded horizon of empathy and self-identification, and ethical and aesthetic perception and judgement.
It offers a more detailed exploration of how the emerging natural design movement also engenders a fundamental reconsideration of our understanding of ethics and aesthetics.
Subchapter four describes how the various members of the natural design movement have approached nature as a source of knowledge, wisdom and insight that deeply informs their design process. It discusses and exemplifies a new way of learning from nature.
And finally, subchapter five continues with the theme of responsible co-design of humanity’s active participation in natural processes, by exploring the notion of co-design of complex systems, which serves as a general introduction to the scales of sustainable design and the complex scale -linking issues that are explored in much more detail in chapters four and five.
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3.1) Exploring the History of Ecologically Conscious Design
Human ingenuity may make various inventions … but it will never devise any invention more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting and nothing is superfluous. Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519 (in Schneider, 1995, p.189)
Much can be written on the history of ecologically conscious design. Human pre-history and history is full of examples of appropriate and of disastrous environmental management and resource use. The oldest written record of humanity is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a remnant of the
Sumerian civilization, which inhabited the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia around 4000 BC.
The epic tells the story of a king defying the warning of the forest-god Humbaba and cutting down the sacred cedar forests of Lebanon in a vain project to build ever-bigger palaces in the ancient royal city of Ur. The result was the fall of a civilization and the fertile land between
Euphrates and Tigris changed into the dry and barren landscape of modern Iraq.
The first surviving written message to posterity warns – in its own mythopoetical way – of the effects of bad design that ignores its context. King Gilgamesh cut down the forests and killed Humbaba. The result was a revenge of the gods or what modern science would explain by describing how deforestation alters regional climate by reducing the vegetation-driven local hydrological cycles and leads to down-wind desertification, soil erosion and salination
(Hartmann, 1999, pp.85-86).
Despite ancient warnings like this – and humanity’s myths, sagas, and the world’s religious scriptures are full of them (see e.g. the work of Mary Evelyn Tucker, and Joseph
Campbell, or Baird Callicott, 1994))- neither examples of sustainable (ecologically conscious) design nor unsustainable design that ignores natural, social, and cultural context are hard to find.
Human history provides numerous examples of localized civilizations outstripping their own resource base, which led to environmental catastrophes, wars for resources and ultimately the decline of those civilizations. First the Etruscans, then the Greeks and later the Romans, all contributed to the deforestation of North Africa and the Mediterranean coastlines – peaceful trading turned to aggressive imperialism and war, as resources declined.
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But we don’t have to look to ancient history to find examples. The decades of conflict between Israel and Palestine have many historical and political causes, but most of the confrontation about the territories occupied by Israel is fundamentally about access to water supplies.
Likewise, the recent neo-imperialist wars of the current US administration in
Afghanistan and Iraq are examples of the world’s most resource-hungry and oil-dependent nation asserting its right to secure access to resources by force. As long as the current resource gluttony of the USA, is an integral part of what George Bush senior referred to when he emphasized that “the American way of life is non negotiable,” then by implication an equitable, peaceful and sustainable future for humanity remains non-negotiable.
There is no point in deferring responsibility and demonising anybody or any nation.
Most people in the, so-called, developed world are currently living above the planet’s ecological means. Gandhi was right, and still is, in emphasizing: “There is plenty to meet everybody’s need, but not enough to meet everybody’s greed.” A more sustainable civilization will have to be a more ecologically conscious civilization and this includes being a more socially equitable civilization.
It is a sign of bad, not sufficiently ecologically conscious design that the world’s most developed and economically powerful nations are putting the biggest strains on the world’s resources and planetary life support systems. The dominant life-style design in the industrial growth society is still dangerously disregarding ecological limits and contributing to the destruction of the planet’s life support system.
Through economic globalisation, such unsustainable life-style design has now been exported to the whole world. It is an ecological and planetary impossibility for all Chinese and
Indians to live the life-style and follow the patterns of production and consumption of the average US American, British, or German citizen. The transformation towards a sustainable and equitable human civilization will require global collaboration and important life-style changes for people everywhere. To maintain human, ecosystems and planetary health (and wealth) we need to fundamentally re-design life-styles in the developed world and enable
The Natural Design Movement 246 people in the global North and South to meet their needs sustainably and equitably within the ecological limits of their local environment.
There are many historical and modern day examples of how human beings, all over the world, have managed to meet the needs of locally adapted, place-based communities within the limits of their local environment. Many traditional cultures prove that it is possible to sustain locally adapted, place-based communities for centuries and even millennia through prudent and ecologically and socially responsible resource management and sustainable ways to meet human needs within the limits and opportunities set by the natural conditions of their particular region.
Such ecologically conscious resource management and design practices have been employed by locally adapted cultures found on most continents. Traditional sustainable land management can be found in Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia and the Americas. For example, Joseph
Needham, an expert on ancient China, explains:
In the Chinese worldview … the harmonious cooperation of all beings arose, not from the orders of a superior authority external to themselves, but from the fact that they were part in a hierarchy of wholes forming a cosmic pattern, and what they obeyed were the internal dictates of their own nature. Joseph Needham (in Capra, 1982, p.289)
This worldview places human beings and their designs within the holarchy of natural processes.
It recognizes human design to be part of nature. When considered along evolutionary time- scales, human beings will not, in the long run be able to create things that are disruptive to natural process. Such cultures will ultimately not survive. Cultures that do survive in the long term succeed in adjusting their design strategies to the underlying natural process in which they participate. Nature’s own pattern of creation and transformation was referred to under the concept of Li in ancient China.
In its most ancient meaning, it [Li] signified the pattern of things, the markings of jade or fibre in muscle … It acquired the common dictionary meaning ‘principle’, but always conserved the undertone of ‘pattern’ … There is ‘law’ implicit in it, but this law is the law to which parts of wholes have to conform by the virtue of their very existence as parts of wholes … the most important thing about parts is that they have to fit precisely into place with the other parts in the whole organism they compose. Joseph Needham (in Capra, 1982, pp.289-290)
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To conform to the natural design principle, Li was to act in accordance with the true nature of things, in accordance with the Tao. Such a worldview, such meta-design principles, integrates human beings into the transforming holarchy of the self-sustaining and self-healing patterns of natural process. Aldo Leopold described a very similar kind of ecologically conscious meta- design exists in the cosmology of Native American tribes:
The implicit overall metaphysic of American Indian cultures locates human beings in a larger social as well as physical, environment. People belong not only to a human community, but a community of all nature as well. Existence in this larger society, just as existence in a family and tribal context, places people in an environment in which reciprocal responsibilities and mutual obligations are taken for granted and assumed without question or reflection. Aldo Leopold (in Palmer, 2001, p.293).
Traditional cultures, their belief systems and place-based knowledge – their cultural meta- design - can teach us a lot about how to participate appropriately in natural process. Simply the existence of such cultures implies that exploitation, domination, and competition are not inevitable expressions of a pessimistically interpreted human nature. Traditional cultures provide a rich diversity of examples of humans in cooperative reciprocity with their natural environment. Tribes like the Hopi have been the human expressions of natural process in the territory they inhabit for approximately ten thousand years (Wahl, 2002b, p.93).
“The modern mind-set must integrate understanding of Indigenous peoples’ traditional relationship with the land in order to achieve long-term sustainability, not only for Native communities, but for everyone everywhere” (Cajete, 1999, p.vii). Professor Gregory Cajete, of the Tewa tribe suggests: “Implied here is the essence of the conflict between worldviews: non- anthropocentric (Indigenous) versus anthropocentric (Western industrial). The former is grounded on the interconnectedness of humans with the land and natural forces in general, as well as with all other living creatures. In contrast, the latter tends to separate living creatures and nonorganic matter into hierarchies with humans at the centre or pinnacle of all” (Cajete,
1999, p.viii).
Cajete explains how, for Native people throughout the Americas, the relationship between humanity and nature was not one of separation but of participation. Human culture was the human expression of the local environment. While the actual terms and concepts like
‘ecology’ and ‘design’ are admittedly part of the Western intellectual tradition, it is nevertheless
The Natural Design Movement 248 evident that Native people had, and to some extent still have, a tradition of ecologically conscious design. Their design of artefacts and their patterns of production and consumption are aimed at appropriate participation in natural process and the maintenance of a healthy community within a healthy ecosystem.
The environment was not separate or divorced from Native peoples’ lives, but rather was the context or set of relationships that tied everything together. They understood ecology not as something apart from themselves or outside their intellectual reality, but rather as the very centre and generator of self- understanding. As a centre, that environmental understanding became the guiding mechanism for the ways in which they expressed themselves and their sense of sacredness (Cajete, 1999, p.6).
By ignoring the wisdom contained in traditional cultures of appropriate participation, humanity is trading the fleeting experience of possessing power over nature (in the form of modern science and technology) for the collective treasure of our ancestral wisdom of appropriate participation in nature. The diverse cultural, indigenous traditions of the world hold crucial knowledge of specific conditions of places over time, knowledge reflecting changes in the environmental variables of a particular place and of appropriate local adaptations to those changes. As Christopher Day rightly points out: “Culture, though bounded with place, is handed down through living continuity. If generational links are broken, traditional practices no longer seem relevant” (Day, 2002, p.148). This is the great danger inherent in the loss of traditional knowledge and social community cohesion everywhere in the world.
David Orr emphasizes that traditional knowledge, rooted in local culture “is a source of community cohesion, a framework that explains the origins of things (cosmology), and provides the basis for preserving fertility, controlling pests, and conserving biological diversity …” (Orr,
1992, p.32). To illustrate, Orr refers to a study by Norgaard linking the loss of traditional knowledge directly to an increase in the rate of species extinction in a particular area. Orr suggests that the growing un-sustainability of modern civilization has gone hand in hand with the loss of traditional, place-based and ecologically conscious design practices: “The crisis of sustainability has occurred only when and where … [the] union between knowledge, livelihood, and living has been broken and knowledge is used for the single purpose of increasing productivity” (Orr, 1992, p.32).
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“Local knowledge is valuable because it is appropriate” (van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996, p.63). Sim van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan argue that local knowledge is built up through the
“steady process of cultural accretion,” which reflects the collective sum of individual experience with, for example, local soils, crops and weather. They suggest that this kind of knowledge is
“an irreplaceable design resource,” since it represents the condensed knowledge of a diversity of people experiencing and adapting to environmental change over time – knowledge of place- specific constraints and possibilities (van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996, p.64).
In a sense, ecological design is really just the unfolding of place through the hearts and minds of its inhabitants. It embraces the realization that needs can be met in the potentialities of the landscape and the skills already present in the community. Sustainability is embedded in processes that occur over very long periods of time and are not always visually obvious. … Without local knowledge, places erode (van der Ryn & Cowan, 1996, p.65).
Traditional cultures all over the world, guided by worldviews that integrated them into nature and made the ecologically conscious, have co-evolved a wealth of knowledge and practical ways of appropriate participation in natural process that are delicately matched to their local environment. More often than not, we only begin to understand the subtlety of their designs once we have destroyed them, like in the example of the intricate irrigation systems on the island of Bali, which fell victim to attempts to improve their design – without ecological awareness – during the so-called ‘green revolution’ driven by trans-national agribusiness in the
1970s (see Jack-Todd & Todd, 1993).
It is often overconfidence in the ability and efficiency of modern technology and scientific solutions that promote such destruction of careful and subtle designs that have evolved over centuries. These ecologically conscious designs are so successfully matched to the scale - linking processes of the local place that in some cases, like the forest gardens of the Kogi, in
Columbia, it is difficult to recognize that what seems to be virgin cloud forest is actually a productive agriculture system co-created by humans and their natural habitat (Wahl, 2002b, p.95). Recent discoveries suggest that as much as 12% of the Amazon Rainforest may actually be a human made artefact. Indigenous tribes may have created an actively regenerating soil type, called ‘Terra preta’, that can return fertility to impoverished soils (Mann, 2002).
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David Orr believes that traditional, place-based cultures, “without using the word
‘ecology,’ have designed with ecology in mind, because to do otherwise would bring ruin, famine, and social disintegration.” He argues: “Out of necessity they created harmony between intentions and the genius of a particular place that preserved diversity, both cultural and biological capital; utilized current solar income; created little or no waste; imposed few unaccounted costs; and supported cultural and social patterns” (Orr, 2002, p.9).
It is possible to be ecologically conscious without the use of the concept of ecology. A participatory awareness of fundamental interconnectedness and interdependence between the individual, the community and the natural cycles has led Native people all over the world to create ecologically conscious, place-based design. For the majority of human history, human communities followed such locally adapted design practices that respected ecological limits. In the long run, failure to do so is a biological and evolutionary impossibility that leads straight to extinction.
The historic and still existing examples of traditional and indigenous design practices that are informed by a more ecologically conscious design process could fill many volumes over, but the prerequisite for accessing and revealing all this wealth of knowledge is to understand and admit that indigenous and traditional cultures have a lot to teach us in the transformation of modern humanity into a truly sustainable global civilization. Despite the undeniably impressive achievements of modernity, to refer to such cultures as ‘primitive’ is yet another manifestation of our industrial growth society’s short-sighted hubris.
The prime differences are that the ‘primitive’ people generally have more leisurely lives, less poverty, virtually no crime, … a more diverse healthy diet, less degenerative disease, better psychological health, and a culture which olds as its primary values cooperation (rather than competition), and equality (between people between sexes, and between human and nature) rather than power (Hartmann, 1999, p.153).
Clearly there are exceptions to the general description offered by Hartmann, and many ancient cultures have by now been eroded into poverty and alcoholism by the impact of colonialism and economic globalisation. Nobody is trying to create a picture of an idealized ‘golden’ past or suggesting a return to a previous chapter in human evolution. Nevertheless there are important design lessons to be learned from traditional and indigenous cultures; and if they are integrated
The Natural Design Movement 251 appropriately, modern science and technology will synergistically be applied along side the contribution of such traditional, place-based design wisdom.
To explore, in detail, examples of ecologically or environmentally conscious natural design expressed by the world’s indigenous cultures would certainly overextend the already substantial scope of this thesis. Obviously. there is a rich pattern of relationships and interactions to be explored with regard to the possible lessons that ecologically conscious design and local craft based traditions of manufacture offer to a re-thinking of modern product design.
This field of research has to await further exploration at a different time. Victor Papanek explored some design lessons based on his suggestion that the Inuit people, who had to adapt to a particularly resource limited environment in a taxing climate are “the best designers in the world” (Papanek, 1995, pp.224).
Scope not permitting, it is impossible to trace the rich tradition of ecologically conscious design through a detailed introduction of all its contributors, particularly within the context of the greatly expanded definition of design adopted in this thesis. There is a rich tradition within the history of Western intellectual discourse over the last two and a half millennia of people who reminded their contemporaries of the importance of designing and acting in accordance with nature, and who emphasized fundamental interconnectedness and a holistic worldview.
Among the philosophical, spiritual and intellectual roots of this ecologically conscious, holistic vision of humanity’s relationship to natural process as a whole were amongst others:
Heraclitus (c.500 BC); Virgil (70-19 BC); Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226); Hildegart von
Bingen (1098-1179); Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1328); Leonard Da Vinci (1452-1519); Benedict
Spinoza (1632-1677); Paracelsus (1493-1541); and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832).
To substantiate this claim with historical and scholarly evidence goes beyond this thesis. The idea of meta-design as cultural transformation based on changes in organizing ideas and worldview (see chapter one) clearly invites an investigation into a new kind of design history – a fruitful area for future research.
Especially during the course of the last two and a half centuries, partially in response to the increasing transformation of nature and society since the Industrial Revolution, an ever-
The Natural Design Movement 252 richer pattern of voices heralding the emergence of the natural design movement can be found.
Again, it pays to keep in mind Goethe’s admonition that any formulation of something new, always caries remnants of the old within it. People and their ideas have to be placed within their cultural and historical context. It is thus possible that various of the people expressing early formulations of the ideas behind the natural design movement might have simultaneously held a number of other beliefs which now seem at odds with an ecological awareness and a more holistic point of view.
Among the people that would merit a more detailed investigation with regard to their work’s relevance to the history of the natural design movement, I would name the following:
William Blake (1757-1827); William Wordsworth (1770-1850); John Claudius Loudon (1783-
1843); Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-82); Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862); John Ruskin
(1819-1900); Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903); William Morris (1834-1896); Ernst von
Haeckel (1834-1919); John Muir (1838-1914); Sir Patrick Geddes (1854 - 1931); Nikola Tesla
(1856-1943); Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925); Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941); Frank Lloyd
Wright (1867 – 1959); Mahatma Gandhi (1869 – 1948); Viktor Schauberger (1885-1958); Aldo
Leopold (1887-1948); Richard Neutra (1892-1970); Lewis Mumford (1895-1990); R.
Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983); Gregory Bateson (1904-1980); Rachel Carson (1907-1964);
E.F. Schumacher (1911-1977); Ian L. McHarg (1920-2001); Frederick Vester (1925-2003);
Victor Papanek (1927-1998); John Tillman Lyle (1934-1998); and Donella Meadows (1942-
2001).
This list only includes those people, who have passed on. There are a much larger number of very crucial contributors to the emerging ecological or natural design movement, who are fortunately still actively engaged in their life’s work of helping to give birth to a more sustainable and ecologically conscious human civilization. They are introduced throughout the course of this thesis.
Nor is the list above complete by any means. There are various important contributors mentioned in this thesis who are not specifically listed here. I have italicised those people whose influence on the formulation of a new and more ecologically conscious approach to design, I regard as particularly important. Five of them will be introduced in greater detail
The Natural Design Movement 253 during the remainder of this subchapter; others are introduced in different chapters within the context of their specific contributions.
Sir Patrick Geddes (1854 - 1931):
Geddes was convinced that “our greatest need today is to grasp life as whole, to see its many sides in their proper relations; but we must have a practical as well as a philosophical interest in such an integrated view of life” (in Mairet, 1957, p.xii). He wrote these lines calling for ecological consciousness almost a century ago! Patrick Geddes’ call for an integrated view of life deserves even more attention today when the effects of the Industrial Revolution have had profound global effects and have literally re-designed the face of the Earth.
Patrick Geddes firmly believed that “there is a larger view of Nature and Life, a rebuilding of analyses into Synthesis, an integration of many solitary experiences into a larger
Experience…” (Geddes, 1895, p.32). Such a synthesis of knowledge and action that embeds economical, social and cultural considerations firmly into an understanding of the ecological limits of the biosphere will have to go hand in hand with a reintegration of the arts, the humanities and the sciences into a new trans-disciplinary perspective that will guide collaborative and interdisciplinary research in the 21st century.
Seeing “life as whole”, which is to understand life as a dynamic process in which humanity participates, raises awareness of the fundamental interconnectedness of nature and culture. Patrick Geddes understood that such a participatory worldview informed by detailed knowledge about the natural conditions of a local region will be instrumental in facilitating the emergence of sustainable human societies uniquely adapted to their particular region.
Inspired by the French sociologist Frederic Le Play’s (1802-1886) triad of ‘Lieu,
Travail, Famillle’ – which Geddes translated to “Work, Place, Folk” – Geddes developed a new approach to regional and town planning based on the integration of people and their livelihood into the natural givens of the particular place and region they inhabit. He emphasized an inventory of a region’s hydrology, geology, flora, fauna, climate and natural topography, as well as its social and economic opportunities and challenges. As such, the Geddesian methodology
The Natural Design Movement 254 pioneered the bioregional planning approach almost a century before the emergence of bioregionalism (see chapter four).
Since the first United Nations conference on the environment in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 the Local Agenda 21 approach to citizen participation in the challenges of sustainability at the community scale has spread internationally. It may come as a surprise to many that the popular rallying call of grass-roots sustainability “Think Global, Act Local” can be attributed to Geddes’ most popular book Cities in Evolution, which was published in 1915 (Stephen, 2004, p.14).
Patrick Geddes led by example through his theoretical and practical work as a planner and educator, in his native Scotland as well as in India, Cyprus, France and Palestine.
Anybody who has enjoyed a scenic stroll through the old town of Edinburgh, up the
Royal Mile and down to the Grassmarket, owes part of this experience to the spirited regeneration work of Patrick Geddes and his wife Anna. Between 1887 and the beginning of the 20th century, they engaged the inhabitants of the dilapidated old town slums in a clean up of their own neighbourhood and established the world’s first student-run halls of residence along the Royal Mile.
During that time, Geddes also created a “sociological laboratory” and centre for popular regional education in a global context that he called the “Outlook Tower”. He built Ramsay gardens on the castle esplanade, he took up the chair of Botany at the University College,
Dundee, and pioneered the first international summer school in Europe. Geddes was the archetype of an academic that could not be confined to a single discipline and either a purely practical or a purely theoretical focus for his endeavours. He was a generalist who moved freely between the roles of biologist, sociologist, town and regional planner, exhibition designer, public and academic educator, as well as patron of the arts and natural philosopher.
Geddes participatory approach to civic action, that emphasized the need for humanity’s integration into natural process at the scale of the region, and his recognition of education as the facilitator of societal change, along with his interdisciplinary design methodology offers thoroughly modern pathways to sustainability.
Geddes was keenly aware that fundamental change in the physical domain requires fundamental change in the underlying attitudes and consciousness, and identified
The Natural Design Movement 255 interdisciplinary education as the facilitator of such societal change. He believed in the possibility and necessity of society’s evolution towards higher levels of consciousness and co- operation. Volker Welter suggested that Geddes identified “misadaptation to the natural environment as the underlying cause of urban problems.” He goes on to explain:
For Geddes, conflicts arise not between classes but between occupational groups and the environment. As the aim is to adjust the whole city to the environment, cooperation among citizens becomes not only a viable option but a necessity (Welter, 2002, p.66).
According to Geddes, it was through the notion of right livelihood that humanity could begin to integrate into natural process rather than continue to dominate and exploit nature through ever more destructive technologies. He believed that eventually, the destructive technologies that emerged from the Industrial revolution and led to the progressive subjugation of human beings and the environment to the machine, would give way to anew “geotechnology” that was to meet human needs within the limits of the planetary biosphere.
Geddes talked about a shift from the “paleotechnic age” where life as a whole was threatened to the “neotechnic age” – also refered to him as the “eutechnic age” – when life would resurge. He saw life as the underlying process that connects nature and culture. During the paleotechnic age technological progress involves the renuncia tion of the organic and its substitution by the mechanical; wealth is measured in purely monetary terms rather than in terms of quality of life and environmental health.
In contrast, during the emergence of the eutechnic age, the goal of technology is to meet human needs and to integrate into natural process thus creating a healthy environment. Geddes believed that, in this eutechnic age, nature conservation and restoration would be a priority. It would lead to a greening of the cities and the development of a “new technology based on new sources of energy, clean, unpolluting and efficient …” (Leonard, 1992, p.76).
Furthermore, Geddes suggested that eventually a shift away from the predominantly competitive outlook that characterized the paleotechnic age would lead to a focus on greater cooperation at the regional, national and global scale during the eutechnic age (to be understood as eu from the Greek word for good, thus, ‘the age of good technologies’).
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From an optimistic point of view, one could regard the frequent calls for the consideration of ethical, social and environmental responsibility in business, government, and civil society, along with the progress made in fields like green product design, renewable energy technologies and in integrated planning approaches as indications that we are finally – a hundred years after Geddes’ proclaimed his vision of the eutechnic age – reaching the critical mass for such a shift to actually occur. The systems theorist, Buddhist scholar and deep ecologist Joanna Macy describes this shift from the currently still dominant “industrial growth society” to a “life sustaining society” as “the time of the great turning” (Macy & Brown, 1998, pp.17-18).
With regard to the filed of economics, Geddes took his initial inspiration from John
Ruskin. In an early paper, entitled ‘John Ruskin: Economist’, first published in 1885, Geddes agrees with Ruskin’s assessment that market forces should not control economics, but what was needed instead was a new approach to economics that focussed on true quality of life by answering to the biological and aesthetic needs of humanity (Meller, 1993, p.30). Based on his biological understanding of the dynamics of ecosystems, Geddes suggested that a high degree of specialization in the function of an organism within a highly complex society would lead to a decrease of individual competition.
In a paper entitled ‘An Analysis of the Principles of Economics”, that Geddes presented at the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1883, he compared the physical principles of economics based on mechanical metaphors of industrial production and the absorption and dissipation of energy, with the biological principles of economics that took an evolutionary perspective of life as a process that connects culture and nature. Geddes warned that the specialization of labour – if not balanced with profoundly interdisciplinary education – could have detrimental effects on individual, cultural and eventually environmental health (in Meller, 1993).
A clear focus on education was needed to support the continued evolution of culture and society. He argued that the “key objective of the biological principles of economics was not food and shelter but culture and education”(in Meller, 1993, p.60). For Geddes, the creation of an educated, and regionally adapted culture was the prerequisite for the long-term assurance of the provision of food and shelter for all citizens. Helen Meller has suggested that it was this
The Natural Design Movement 257 conviction, which lead Geddes to pronounce his famous dictum “social evolution depends on art” (in Meller, 1993, p.60).
Geddes believed a society was able to evolve healthily if its people and their livelihoods were adapted to the specific conditions of their local region. Such adaptation required a form of interdisciplinary education that made people aware of how their livelihood fitted into the overall pattern of adapting local culture to local nature. In Geddes opinion, art and architecture had the dual function of expressing and educating about the symbiotic relationship between nature and culture.
The impulses set by Patrick Geddes had a very important influence on the emergence of what I am describing un this thesis as the natural design movement. His notion of scale - sensitive, ecologically and socially conscious planning and design, as well as his emphasis of the critical role that trans-disciplinary education plays in enabling and empowering an informed citizenry to implement such design is of remarkable relevance to the creation of a sustainable society.
Lewis Mumford (1895-1990):
Ian McHarg described Mumford as “the most knowledgeable and wisest man” he had ever known (McHarg, 1996). Lewis Mumford was an educated critique of humanity’s design follies during the 20th century. For over 30 years, he wrote as an architectural critic for The New
Yorker magazine. His articles and books covered the modern phenomenon of urbanization and the difference between healthy and pathological cities. He wrote on the dangers and potential of technology, modern society, as well as about literature.
Influenced strongly by the work of Sir Patrick Geddes, Mumford became a founding member of the Regional Planning Association of America, which promoted Geddesian design principles of limited scale development and a town and city planning approach that surveys and integrates into the natural and social conditions of the local region. Mark Luccarelli describes
Mumford’s ecological regional vision as follows:
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Mumford advanced a conception of regional development that accounted for the mutual importance of the social world and the natural ecosystem. In his unique interpretation of the role of ‘technics’ in ‘civilization’, Mumford linked the planning of towns and cities to an empathic understanding of the complex natural region. The natural region, with its characteristic local variations, could be saved only through a new (actually very old) kind of urban and regional planning conceived as an instrument of a civic-minded social order. Planning for ecological regionalism required cultural and political renewal (Luccarelli, 1995, p.1).
Mumford saw himself as a ‘public intellectual’, a mediator and transmitter of ideas. “But in the process of transmission, Mumford created his own particular synthesis: an interdisciplinary approach that drew from developments in social science and cultural criticism.” The wide range of his interests “reflects Mumford’s holistic approach to the study of society and culture”
(Luccarelli, 1995, p.17). The catalytic role of wide-spread ecoliteracy and an ecologically conscious citizenry in the transformation towards a sustainable human civilization calls for many more such public intellectuals to bridge the gap between academia and the rest of civil society. Public intellectuals like Mumford are active meta-designers of a sustainable society.
“For Mumford, any adequate response to a crisis of civilization, marked by the attainment of the power to annihilate, required a fundamental change in thinking, a change that must begin in the psyche.” Luccarelli suggests that Mumford saw to the core of our civilizational crisis believing that it emerged from a “limited notion of self” and “a definition of subjectivity rooted in opposition to nature” (Luccarelli, 1995, p.20). Luccarelli concludes:
Mumford saw that changing the boundaries of self implies changes in culture, values and worldview. … … community became essential to Mumford’s work; he sensed that a revived democratic society was necessary to make regionalism an operative ideal, one capable of redefining economy and technology along ecological lines. These two projects – the investigation of the conception of self in American culture and the inquiry into the origins and prospects of regionalism – formed the basis for Mumford’s work. The former led him to investigate the social and aesthetic implications of contrasting conceptions of subjectivity; the latter required the investigation of geography and the uses of new technologies and planning to effect a different kind of geographic order: the re-creation of a regional geography. … The cultivation of the experience of place shaped Mumford’s interest in regionalism as a cultural vision. And he connected this cultural project to a civic politics necessary to support regional planning (Luccarelli, 1995, pp.20-21).
According to Mumford, the role of aesthetics was to inform appropriate participation in community and in natural process – an aesthetic ideal of culture-nature symbiosis. He understood humanity’s participatory role in natural process and the necessary co-evolution of
The Natural Design Movement 259 communities and their environment. Mumford realized that such co-evolution needed a holistic, and multi-disciplinary perspective to guide appropriate participation in natural process, and called for increased participation of responsible citizens in the regional planning process and the creation of a culturally guiding vision.
“His central point was that a complete community does involve aesthetic questions, specifically the design of place.” Mumford believed that “without concern for the form and design of cities, there is little prospect for cultivated urban life.” He emphasized the difference between the ‘container’ and the ‘contents’ of any city. “The ‘container’ designates the form and structure; the ‘contents’ include the people, their way of life, social organization, human memory and cultural disposition” (Luccarelli, 1995, p.210). Luccarelli writes:
Mumford continued to stress the need to design viable urban forms that can channel human activities in a way compatible with the re-discovery of a functional and creative relation between culture and the natural world. For Mumford, the ‘container’ must stand in creative relation to its ‘contents’ – the human society that inhabits it – in a way that permits “organic complexity” …. The most important lesson to be drawn from the garden city pertains to its vision of “place.” … the larger issue is the importance of an aesthetic- moral perspective that informs the creation of real communities. When made part of a planner’s vision, a sense of “place” fosters interaction between residence and work and between the built environment and the natural region (Luccarelli, 1995, p.210).
In Mumford’s book The Myth of the Machine, published in 1967, he delivers a strong critique of the design of nuclear weapons and warns that the development of inappropriate machines could threaten humanity itself. Mumford coined the term ‘ecotechnics’ to describe “technologies that rely on local sources of energy and indigenous materials in which variety and craftsmanship add ecological consciousness, as well as beauty and aesthetics” (Kibert, 2005, p.115). For Mumford such ecotechnics would create healthy environments in which nature as well as the human body and mind can flourish. He understood the aesthetics of appropriate participation in natural process and recognized the intimate reciprocity between humanity and the rest of nature.
If man had originally inhabited a world as blankly uniform as a ‘highrise’ housing development, as featureless as a parking lot, as destitute of life as an automated factory, it is doubtful that he would have had a sufficiently varied experience to retain images, mould language, or acquire ideas Lewis Mumford (in Goldsmith, 1996, p.348).
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Lewis Mumford recognized humanity as an expression of natural process. Nature brings forth and sustains our humanness. He was fully aware of the fact that responsible and appropriate participation in natural process requires a change in the dominant metaphor of scientific and design thinking away from mechanistic thinking to organismic metaphors. In order to create a responsible and appropriate technology, humanity has to learn from rather than attempt to dominate nature. Lewis Mumford was a powerful voice of the emerging natural design movement. In The Pentagon of Power, Mumford argues:
If we are to prevent megatechnics from further controlling and deforming every aspect of human culture, we shall be able to do so only with the aid of a radically different model derived directly, not from machines, but from living organisms and organic complexes (ecosystems). What can be known about life only through the process of living – and so is part of even the humblest of organisms – must be added to all the other aspects that can be observed, abstracted, and measured” (Mumford, 1964, p.395).
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983):
Affectionately and respectfully referred to by many as “Bucky”, he was one of the most influential design polymaths of the 20th century. Fuller has been described as an inventor, architect, engineer, mathematician, poet, cosmologist, visionary humanist, inspirational orator and the 20th-century Leonardo da Vinci (Baldwin, 1996; Kibert, 2005).
Buckminster Fuller’s work contributed significantly to the emergence of the natural design movement. In particular through the role he took in inspiring many young ecological designers during the nineteen sixties and seventies. His engineer’s perspective predisposed
Fuller to mechanistic, technological metaphors, yet a deep understanding of complexity informed his holistic, ecologically conscious approach to design.
“His list of accomplishments is long, among them the design of the aluminium
Dymaxion car in 1933; the design of the autonomous Dymaxion House in the 1920s, one of which was built in Wichita, Kansas in 1946; and of course the geodesic dome in the 1950s.”
Kibert has argued the Fuller was “at heart, an ecologist. His designs emphasized resource conservation: the use of renewable energy in the form of sun and wind; the use of lightweight ephemeral materials such as bamboo, paper, and wood; and the concept of design for
The Natural Design Movement 261 deconstruction” (Kibert, 2005, p.111). In his “bold blueprint for survival that diagnoses the causes of the environmental crisis”, entitled Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, first published in 1969, Fuller wrote:
The fossil fuel deposits of our Spaceship Earth correspond to our automobile’s storage battery which must be conserved to turn over our main engine’s self-starter. Thereafter, our ‘main engine,’ the life generating processes, must operate exclusively on our vast daily energy income from the powers of wind, tide, water, and the direct Sun radiation energy. The fossil-fuel savings account has been put aboard Spaceship Earth for the exclusive function of getting the new machinery built with which to support life and humanity at ever more effective standards of vital physical energy and reinspiring metaphysical sustenance to be sustained exclusively on our Sun’s radiation and Moon’s pull … We cannot afford to expend our fossil fuels faster than we are ‘recharging our battery,’ which means precisely the rate at which the fossil fuels are being continually deposited within Earth’s spherical crust. We have discovered that it is highly feasible for all human passengers aboard Spaceship Earth to enjoy the whole ship without any individual interfering with another and without any individual being advanced at the expense of another, providing that we are not so foolish as to burn up our ship and its operating equipment by powering our prime operations exclusively on atomic reactor generated energy. The too- shortsighted and debilitating exploitation of fossil fuel and atomic energy are similar to running our automobiles onl on the self-starters and batteries…(Fuller, 1969, 111-112)
The language Fuller used to communicate his ideas and concepts more precisely, takes a certain effort to penetrate and get used to. He said himself: “I made up my mind as a Rule of
Communication that I wouldn’t care if I was not understood – so long as I was not misunderstood” (in Baldwin, 1996, p.10).
While the multi-perspective worldview formulated by the diverse contributors to the ecological or natural design movement transcends certain aspects of Fuller’s language and approach (the one’s in which he was a child of his own time), other aspects of Fuller’s work remain deeply instructive and deserve our continued attention.
One of Fuller’s devotees, and a long-time student and collaborator of his, J. Baldwin, more recently trie d to draw attention to the unexplored potential that still lies in the work of this extraordinary visionary of design, in a book entitled Bucky Works – Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today. Baldwin describes Fuller’s concept of ephemeralization in these words:
Design is at its best the closer it approaches the purely metaphysical… Ephemeralization is not something you add to a design, it occurs naturally as the result of applied natural principles. It’s more of an attitude than a strategy (Baldwin, 1996, p.15)
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Baldwin’s delightful book explores most of Fuller’s fundamental design concepts devised from natural principles. It is richly illustrated with Bucky’s own sketches of 4D ephemeral tower- block buildings with integrated wind-generators and zeppelin air-ships cruising above. In many ways Fuller’s work opened a window onto a future that many of our contemporaries are still unable to glimpse. Fuller was a true visionary. He was probably the first to call for a “design science revolution” as the necessary means to move humanity out of the dead end street it still is heading down. Baldwin explains his mentor’s vision:
Comprehensive anticipatory design science demands maximum overall efficiency with the least cost to society and ecology. Being comprehensive is a direction (Bucky called it ‘comprehensive prospecting’) that implies extensive, omnidisciplinary research, a task recently made easier by the Internet. The goal is to optimise, rather than to compromise. … A well-designed product represents thousands of years of refined human experience. Nature is not to be conquered or opposed, but she is to be regarded as a model of applied principles: Nature always does things in the most efficient and economic way. We need to learn how nature makes design decisions. …To be in tune with Universe, our designs should be regenerative. The current, overworked word ‘sustainable’ comes close (Baldwin, 1996, p.63)
Among the most far-reaching achievements of R. Buckminster Fuller is his development of the theory of Synergetics, which he published in two volumes with a combined 1300 pages! The term itself is an amalgamation of the words ‘synergy’ and ‘energetic’. While synergy is referring to the “performance of the whole unpredicted by an examination of the parts or any subassembly of the parts,” the word “energetic refers to energetic geometry.” Fuller recognizes that the entire universe is interrelated and in constant motion or transformation. Therefore describing the world within the three dimensional confines of the Cartesian grid system of x, y, and z axis, omitted at least one dimension: time. Fuller explained: “In fact, experiment shows that we see and comprehend very little of the totality of motion. Therefore society tends to think statically and is always being surprised, often uncomfortably, sometimes fatally.” He emphasized that “lacking dynamic apprehension it is difficult for humanity to get out of its static fixations and specifically to see the great trends evolving” (in Baldwin, 1996, p.69). In
Critical Path, Fuller writes:
Fortunately the mathematical coordinate system that has been and as yet is employed by science is not the coordinate system employed by the physical Universe. Nature is always most economical. Science’s
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coordinate system is not most economical and is therefore difficult. Nature never has to stop to calculate before behaving in the most economic manner. Scientists do. Also, fortunately, we have discovered nature’s coordinate system, which is elegantly simple and popularly comprehensible. (See Synergetics, vols. 1 and 2 – Maclillan, 1975, 1979) (Fuller, 1981, pp.xxvii).
Rather than being based on the 90 degree coordinates of the Cartesian grid, synergetics works with 60 degree coordinates. J. Baldwin explains: “no insubstantial points, straight lines, or infinite planes are employed. Synergetic mathematics is based on experience rather than physically impossible axioms.” Synergetics presupposes that “everything physical must have a shape and structure,” which according to Fuller follow certain laws. “Synergetics describes and models those laws. Like angles, they are unchanged by scale. In physics, synergetics explains the apparent paradox of electromagnetic phenomena being both wave and particle. In design, synergetics reduces or eliminates compromise” (Baldwin, 1996, p.69). A full exploration of synergetics certainly goes beyond the scope of this thesis. The intention here is to highlight its potential significance in the challenge of re-thinking and re-designing the human presence in the world. Synergetics may yet prove to become an important tool for the emerging natural design movement.
One example of applied synergetics is Fuller’s famous geodesic dome. Baldwin points out: “nature often employs geodesic structure for maximum strength and protection.” Fuller understood his geodesic domes as “irrefutable pedagogical demonstrations of the correctness of his synergetic -energetic geometry.” He understood time “as the shortest distance between two points,” and demonstrated that “synergetics can physically model relationships with four or more dimensions, making the visible comprehensible for the first time” (Baldwin, 1996, p.69).
For a more in depth, but nevertheless easily understandable introduction into Buckminster
Fuller’s synergetics, I will have to refer the reader to J. Baldwin’s book. It describes and explains what Fuller referred to in Critical Path as “nature’s fundamental structuring principles of discontinuous-compression-and-continuous-tension as employed in all geodesics and synergetics” (Fuller, 1981, pp.189-190).
Teaching and learning are what we are here to do. Bucky said that biology balanced entropy. Humans were the most powerful (known) antientropic forces of all, because we accumulate and purvey knowledge, adding local order to Universe in the same way that a plant synthesises air, sunlight, and soil nutrients into
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botanical life. Bucky’s definition of Universe did not permit the discouraging concept of an overall entropic ‘winding down’ into total disorderliness. There is always a building-up of orderliness someplace else in nonsimulatneous Universe. Because anti-entropy is a double negative, Bucky called it ‘syntropy’. Our purpose and duty as humans is to be syntropic (Baldwin, 1996, pp.226-227).
J. Baldwin explains that Fuller “considered now to be the Dark Ages compared to what we could accomplish.” He suggests that Fuller “worked 50 years ahead to give us some of the tools we would need to ‘graduate’ into being a wholly successful species.” Fuller believed that
“nature is trying to make us a success, that nature is readying us for an important function.” In his old age Fuller tried to educate a critical mass of people to recognize and take advantage of humanity’s potential for synergy.” He was in hopeful expectation of a necessary and immanent design science revolution (Baldwin, 1996, p.227).
Fuller wrote shortly before his death: “Human integrity is the uncompromising courage of self determining whether or not to take initiatives, support or cooperate with others in accord with ‘all the truth and nothing but the truth’ as it is conceived by the divine mind always available in each individual.” He predicted: “Whether humanity is to continue and comprehensively prosper on Spaceship Earth depends entirely on the integrity of the human individuals and not on the political or economic systems. The cosmic question has been asked –
Are humans a worthwhile to Universe invention?” (in Baldwin, 1996, p.228).
The following paragraph may help to illustrate the above comment about the way Fuller used language and communicated. The paragraph is worth re-reading, as it expresses in his words what I refer to, throughout this thesis, as appropriate participation in natural process, the essence of sustainable, salutogenic, scale -linking and natural design. Appropriate participation in natural process and salutogenesis as guiding principles for design is what Fuller called acting
“in support of integrity of eternally regenerative Universe” (see below).
…humans have always unknowingly affected all Universe by every act and thought they articulate or even consider. Fortunately the unrealistic thinking of humans has had little effect on Universe and evolution whereas realistic thinking has cosmic effectiveness in pure principle. Realistic, comprehensively responsible, omnisystem-considerate, unselfish thinking on the part of humans does absolutely affect human destiny. If the realistic thinking can conceive of technically feasible options facilitating satisfactorily effective human fulfilment of its designed functioning as local Universe information inventorying and local Universe problem-solving in support of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe, then the accomplishment of
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that realistic conceptioning is realistically effective in satisfying Universe that human mind is accomplishing its designed evolutionary role (Fuller, 1981, p.47)
In Fuller’s understanding of the Universe, “there are no solids. There are no things. There are only interfering and noninterfering patterns operative in pure principle, and principles are eternal.” His understanding or what constitutes a principle was very different from the narrow definition of modern science. Fuller believed that “principles can never contradict principles,” rather they can inter-accommodate one another.” He argued: “Everything the brain deals with relates to high-frequency thingness. Mind, and mind alone, deals with understanding the interrelationships existing only between and not in any one principle, considered only by itself.”
Fuller emphasized: “Principles themselves are often subsets of interrelationships existing only between principles” (Fuller, 1981, pp.158-159). Trans-disciplinary design dialogue could become a process to become conscious of these interrelationships.
What Fuller expressed as the need for considering the ‘omnisystem’ or as an
‘omnidisciplinary’ approach, is what this thesis calles for in its repeated emphasis of the need for trans-disciplinary integration and synthesis. Once human designs are salutogenic, contributing to both human and the planetary health, once they are synergistically linked into cooperative networks at every and across every scale; and once they follow nature’s design principles, humanity will begin to fulfil the full potential of its syntropic role in the universe – the universe becoming fully conscious of itself through humanity’s conscious participation.
This is the essence of sustainability – the arrow of evolution arriving in the eternal now of conscious and appropriate participation, responsible co-creation, and creatively adaptive design.
Ian L. McHarg (1920-2001):
McHarg regarded ecology – the study of the relationships between organisms and their environment – not simply as a new area of investigation for the natural sciences, but rather as
“integrative of the sciences, humanities and the arts.” He believed ecology provided the necessary context for understanding the appropriate relationship between humanity and nature
(in Wahl, 2005c, p.15).
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McHarg argued that all human design decisions should be based on ecological awareness. All design should express a culture-nature symbiosis and meet human needs while being beneficial to life as a whole. Design should learn from nature and support the cultural transformation towards a more widely held ecological worldview. McHarg believed that cultural adaptation is the most effective and quickest way to adapt to environmental change and ensure humanity’s survival. He defined this ecological perspective as “a concept of nature as a creative process in which man is involved with all other life forms” (in Wahl, 2005c, p.16). In a recent article on McHarg and the emergence of the natural design movement I suggested:
This kind of profoundly participatory understanding of humanity’s relationship to the natural world and the awareness that our continued survival as a biological species depends on our ability to participate appropriately in nature were the basis on which Ian McHarg called for a new approach to design. In his most popular book, Design with Nature, first published in 1969, McHarg proposes an understanding of evolution as a goal directed process leading towards an increase of complexity, order, diversity, cooperation, dynamic stability and consciousness. In order to design with nature human artefacts, edifices and institutions need to integrate into and positively contribute to this evolutionary process. Natural design is inspired by, learns from, and adapts to the forms and processes we observe in the natural world and aims to contribute positively to the health of the living planet as a whole. … Through adapting our designs to the opportunities and challenges of a particular environment, we can intelligently and creatively meet human needs within the limits of the environment and thereby contribute to overall diversity and dynamic stability, which is synonymous with human and planetary health (Wahl, 2005c, p.16).
McHarg’s call to ‘design with nature’ presaged the design approach of the 21st century – salutogenic, scale -linking, ecologically literate, and natural design. He was a visionary design educator, regional planner, and landscape architect. His contributions to design theory have not yet been fully recognized and may well find increasing appreciation in the coming years as the natural design movement gains a more central position as the new design mainstream.
A telling example of McHarg’s vision as an educator can be found in the groundbreaking interdisciplinary course Man and Environment he designed at the University of
Pennsylvania shortly after he established its Department for Landscape Architecture and
Regional Planning. The course explored the way that different perspectives on the relationship between humanity and nature will result in very different approaches and may alter the intentions behind design. It expressed McHarg’s conviction that in order to create socially and ecologically appropriate designs we will have to engage in a trans-disciplinary dialogue that
The Natural Design Movement 267 helps us to build a multi-perspective understanding of the context within which we are creative as designers. A wide range of guest speakers contributed diverse perspectives from disciplines including: philosophy, theology, anthropology, psychology, economics, ecology, epidemiology, sociology and poetry.
The course and its trans-disciplinary, integrative perspective proved so popular that a
US national television station (CBS) approached McHarg to create a talk-show on the same subject, which was broadcasted between 1960 and 1961 under the title ‘The House we live in.’
The talk show’s distinguished guests included, among many others, Margaret Mead, Erich
Fromm, Sir Julian Huxley, Loren Eiseley and Lewis Mumford (McHarg, 1996, pp.157-165).
To provide such a profoundly interdisciplinary perspective, both in an academic course and on national television in the early 1960s may well have contributed to the rise of the environmental movement in the USA. It reveals McHarg’s understanding of the need for awareness raising and cultural transformation as a means to respond to ecological and social crisis. I would suggest that McHarg was fully aware that he was using two of the most effective media for cultural transformation in order to raise ecological awareness. Following the terminology introduced in chapter one, I would suggest that McHarg engaged in effective meta- design. He attempted to change design up-stream, in people’s conscious awareness and worldviews. The following three quotations from Design with Nature illustrate why McHarg will come to be remembered as a timely catalyst for the emergence of the ecological or natural design movement:
Our eyes do not divide us from the world, but they unite us to it. Let this be known to be true. Let us abandon the simplicity of separation and give unity its due. Let us abandon the self-mutilation which has been our way and give expression to the potential harmony of man-nature … Man is that uniquely conscious creature who can perceive and express. He must become the steward of the biosphere. To do this he must design with nature (McHarg, 1969, p.5).
Clearly the problem of man and nature is not one of providing a decorative background for the human play, or even ameliorating the grim city: it is the necessity of sustaining nature as a source of life, milieu, teacher, sanctum, challenge and, most of all, of rediscovering nature’s corollary of the unknown in the self, the source of meaning (McHarg, 1969, p.19).
Our failure is that of the Western World and lies in prevailing values. Show me a man-oriented society in which it is believed that reality exists only because man can perceive it, that the cosmos is a structure
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erected to support man on its pinnacle, that man exclusively is divine and given dominion over all things, indeed that God is made in the image of man, and I will predict the nature of its cities and their landscape (McHarg, 1969, p.24).
As a landscape architect and regional planner, McHarg established an impressive record of practical design proje cts and developed a new regional planning methodology which ultimately lead to the development of the Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping software, which is today employed by planning departments, architects, and regional and local government in many countries. The software can be used to overlay various maps – McHarg originally used hand-drawn acetates – depicting important environmental attributes of the area in question. By superimposing maps of the regional water courses, soil types, fauna, vegetation and geology,
McHarg was able to better assess the probable environmental impact of a development in a certain site. The multi-layer mapping methodology helps in identifying suitable locations for new developments as well as ecologically and hydrologically sensitive areas that need to be protected from further development. “McHarg used a non-computerized version of this process as early as 1961, during his involvement with the highway route selection of the US Interstate
95, the first planning endeavour to employ a methodology for environmental impact assessment” (Wahl, 2005c, p.15).
It is necessary that society at large understands nature as process, having values, limiting factors, opportunities and constraints; that creation and destruction are real, that there are criteria by which we can discern the direction and tests of evolution; and finally, that there are formal implications revealed in the environment which affect the nature and form of human adaptation (McHarg, 1968, p.60).
McHarg’s design theoretical treatment of the subject of form in the context of his understanding of nature as an interacting and dynamically changing process is deeply insightful. To date,
McHarg’s theory of appropriate form still lacks recognition. Its significance has not been understood widely enough. The theory applies to design on all scales, from product to bioregion and beyond. McHarg expressed these ideas most clearly in 1968, when he was invited to address the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University. He later gave the same paper at the Smithsonian Institution and it was eventually published under the title
‘Values, Process and Form.’ While aspects of the paper – with regard to word use and a few conceptual aspects– may seem slightly dated, it is nevertheless still deeply relevant today and
The Natural Design Movement 269 should be discussed within any design curriculum. McHarg formulates an understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature based on life as a syntropic or negentropic agent in the evolution of the universe. Buckminster Fuller and McHarg are likely to have influenced each other in their formulation of this dynamic perspective.
We must learn that nature includes an intrinsic value-system in which the currency is energy and the inventory is matter and its cycles – the oceans and the hydrologic cycle, life forms and their roles, the cooperative mechanism which life has developed, and, not least, their genetic potential. The measure of success in this process, in terms of the biosphere, is the accumulation of negentropy in physical systems and ecosystems, the evolution of apperception or consciousness, and the extension of symbioses … (McHarg, 1968, p.57).
McHarg’s planetary integration of the human species into natural process and his understanding of the importance of the local, regional and global scale for human and planetary health and well-being anticipated James Lovelock’s and Lynn Margulis’ formulation of the Gaia hypothesis (see chapter one). He argued; “The human organism exists as a result of the symbiotic relationships in which cells assume different roles as blood, tissue, and organs. So, too, can the biosphere be considered as a single superorganism in which the oceans and the atmosphere, all creatures, and communities play roles analogous to cells, tissues, and organs.”
McHarg emphasized: “That which integrates either the cell in the organism or the organism in the biosphere is a symbiotic relationship. In sum, these are beneficial.” From this understanding McHarg concluded: “Symbiosis is the indispensable value in the survival of life forms, ecosystems, and the entire biosphere” (McHarg, 1968, p.67). McHarg explains:
We can look at the world and see our kin; for we are united, by living, with all life, and are from the same origins. Life has proceeded from simple to complex, although the simplest forms have not been superseded, only augmented. It has proceeded from uniform to diverse, from few to many species. Life has revealed evolution as a progression from greater to less entropy. In the beginning was the atom of hydrogen with one electron. Matter evolved in the cosmic cauldrons, adding electron after electron, and terminated in the heaviest and most ephemeral of elements. Simple elements conjoined as compounds, thus reaching the most complex of these as amino acids, which is to say life. Life reached unicellular form and proceeded through tissue and organ to complex organisms. There were few species in the beginning and now there are myriad; there were few roles and now they are legion. There were once large populations of few species; now there is a biosphere consisting of multitudes of communities composed of innumerable interacting species. Evolution has revealed a progression from simple to complex, from uniform to diverse, from unicellular to multicelled, from few to many species, from few to many ecosystems, and the relations between these processes have also evolved toward increased complexity (McHarg, 1968, p.65).
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McHarg places the human species as a conscious participant inside this dynamically evolving and increasingly complex whole. As a consequence of this holistic, process-oriented and spatially and temporally scale -linking perspective, McHarg was able to articulate an understanding of process and form in more general terms.
In chapter one I briefly discussed the similarities between McHarg’s understanding of form and the earlier work on morphology and development by Goethe and D’Arcy Thompson, as well as parallels to modern developmental biology and complexity theory (see subchapter three). McHarg writes:
The place, the plants, the animals, and man and the orderings which they have accomplished over time are revealed in form. To understand this it is necessary to invoke all physical, biological, and cultural evolution. Form and process are indivisible aspects of a single phenomenon: being. Norbert Wiener described the world as consisting of “to whom it may concern” messages, but these are clothed in form. Process and fitness (which is the criterion of process) are revealed in form; form contains meaning. The artefact, tool, room, street, building, town or city, garden or region, can be examined in terms of process, manifest in form, which may be unfit, fit, or most fitting. The last of these, when made by man, is art (McHarg, 1968, p59; my emphasis).
The process of design, as well as the process of biological development involves the coming into being of meaningful form. McHarg regards form as “communication, the presentation of meaning” (McHarg, 1969). He does so without isolating the particular form and its environment. Seeing form in its dynamic context, he regards it as the current expression of a reciprocal process wherein form and environment mutually define each other. Forms are temporal expressions of their underlying process. According to McHarg, “processes are expressive” and “morphology is a superficial expression of the process examined” (McHarg,
1966,p.43).
In Design with Nature, McHarg argued: “The concern with fitness involves meaningful form, and it was seen that evolution has been in the business of form for a very long time and that man is only one of its products.” He explains: “ This meaningful form is not limited to man and his works, but to all things and all beings. Consequently the astronomer and geologist, the plant and animal morphologist are just as concerned in the business of meaningful form as the poet and painter, and so too are the masons and carpenters, the machinist and mechanic,
The Natural Design Movement 271 engineer and architect” (McHarg, 1969, p.165). McHarg warned: Form is not the preoccupation of dilettantes but a central and indissoluble concern for all life (McHarg, 1969, p.173; my emphasis).
Certainly we can dispose of the old canard, “form follows function.” Form follows nothing – it is integral with all processes. Then from is indivisibly meaningful form, but it can reveal ill fit, unfit and most fitting. There seem to be good reasons to change these criteria for human adaptations. Is the environment fit for man? Is the adaptation that is accomplished fit for the environment? Is the fit expressed in form? … If the purpose of fitness is to ensure survival and evolutionary success for the organism, the species, the community and the biosphere, the adaptations are primarily directed towards enhancing life and evolution (McHarg, 1969, p.173).
The last sentence is McHarg’s formulation of a scale -linking (see chapter four) and salutogenic
(see chapter two) approach to design. The form and material of an object communicates how it relates to the underlying processes that brought it forth. This dynamic understanding of process and form reveals objects in their full spatial and temporal contexts, as temporary expressions of the underlying process, which brought them into being.
Where McHarg uses the words ‘fit’ or ‘fitness’, I would be more inclined to use
‘appropriate’ and ‘appropriateness.’ His basic argument is for salutogenic design that is expressed through appropriate form and appropriate participation in natural process. McHarg’s theory of form and process can contribute significantly to a conceptualisation of sustainable design. Modern life-cycle analysis and cradle -to-cradle design is a practical response of this kind of understanding. In 1970, during a speech given to the American Institute of
Architecture, McHarg said:
There is no such thing as abstract form; there is no such thing as capricious form or unmeaningful form. Form and process are indivisible. If one wishes to describe an atom, molecules, crystal, or compound, one can describe it only in formal terms. If one wishes to describe a cell, tissue, organ, organism, or ecosystem, one can only do so in formal terms. All form is meaningful. The degree to which meaning can be perceived is a function of the ability of the observer to perceive the meaning which is intrinsic. One can only understand what is in terms of evolutionary history – evolution of form and process. … One can understand that which is only in terms of that which has been. That which is, has been and is in the process of becoming. It was process-form, is process-form, and will become process-form” (McHarg, 1970, p.182).
I would urge the reader at this point to refer to subchapter six of chapter one (organizing ideas) and Henri Bortoft’s discussion of the solid object mode of perception (Bortoft, 1996); as well as
The Natural Design Movement 272 a recent publication of mine (Wahl, 2005e) that discusses Goethean science and Goethe’s explorations of from and metamorphosis. The similarities in perspective will become immediately apparent. What is emergent is a new theory of dynamic morphology – an understanding of form in transformation and relationship. The emphasis here is to establish Ian
McHarg firmly as one of the early visionaries of ecological planning and design and as a major catalyst of the emerging natural design movement.
Ecological planning is the approach whereby a region is understood as a biophysical and social process comprehensible through the operation of laws and time. This can be reinterpreted as having explicit opportunities and constraints for any particular human use. A survey will reveal the most fit locations and processes. Ecological design follows planning and introduces the subject of form. There should be an intrinsically suitable location, processes with appropriate materials, and forms. Design requires an informed designer with a visual imagination, as well as graphic and creative skills. It selects for creative fitting revealed in intrinsic and expressive form (McHarg, 1997, p.195).
To McHarg, the design or creation of ‘meaningful form’ that fitted its natural environment required a synthesis of all human faculties, a union of art and science. In his usual provocative style, he asked the question: ‘Does art exclude science?’ and continued “‘Does art reject knowledge?’ Would a lombotomy improve human competence, or is the brain an indispensable organ” (McHarg, 1997, p.195). McHarg was a convinced advocate of trans-disciplinarity and called for integration and synthesis. McHarg knew that both art and science are involved in the giving of meaningful and appropriate form.
This antagonism between art and science, as well as between design and planning, has lasted too long. It is now a serious obstruction to education and the earth’s well-being. Both art and design have their antique, prepared position, their mandarin advocates, their lines of competence defined, and their proprietary jargons. Yet, when stripped of pomp and pretensions, at root art merely means skill and science means knowledge. Can we imaging in the challenging environment we occupy, the rejection of either art or science? Surely knowledge needs skill to give form and significance to our landscapes and our adaptations. Surely skill needs knowledge just as a solver needs a problem. Surely, once and for all time, art and science, skill and knowledge, ecology and design and planning should unite (McHarg, 1997, p.196).
In 1970, Ian McHarg gave the opening address to the first Earth Day in Philadelphia. He started his speech with the words: “Why must I be the person who brings the bad news? My proposition is simple. You have no assurance of a future.” He continued: “The view of man and nature which permeates the entire western culture are the reason. Our view of man and
The Natural Design Movement 273 nature does not respond to reality, has no survival value, indeed it is the best guarantee of the extinction of man.” In a few sentences, he built up to his succinct assessment of humanity’s current un-sustainability:
The survival of the human race is contingent upon categorical rejection of this cultural inferiority complex that is the western view and its replacement with the ecological worldview – man in nature. This reveals the ways of the working world and shows our ignorant interventions as self mutilation, leading to suicide, genocide, biocide (in McHarg, 1996, p.210)
An ecological worldview and its associated ecological literacy will help humanity to re-design our participation in natural process and create adaptive designs that support human and planetary health. McHarg knew that in order to be able to design with nature, it is important for designers to understand the evolutionary adaptive relationship between humanity and the wider natural processes that contain it. He acknowledged that nature, as we experience it anywhere on the planet today, is largely determined by the ecological conditions of a given environment and the creative fitting of human culture to the opportunities and limitations presented by that environment. There is no separation between humanity and nature when both are understood as participants in a process that unites them to a larger whole, the biosphere, the Earth, the universe, as they are reflected in consciousness.
McHarg suggested a more holistic and process oriented understanding of evolution that joins life to its environment. His understanding of evolution included and transcended a
Darwinian perspective of the evolutionary process (see also chapter one), which describes the adaptation of individual organisms to their particular environment, expressed through individual fitness, with a complementary perspective, first proposed by the biologist Lawrence J.
Henderson in his book The Fitness of the Environment in 1913.
McHarg explained: “Given the infinitude of environments and organisms and the necessity of accommodation to both, Henderson recommended that there is a necessity for all organisms to find the fittest available environment, and adapt it and the self to accomplish a better fitting” (McHarg, 1996. p.244). McHarg understood that design with nature meant design for life and the health of the whole.
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Save for the atoms themselves, it is life that has longest endured – while continents rise and fall and towering mountain ranges emerge only to erode into inconsequence. Artefacts should be measured in terms of their effect on life, not as independent objects. So the measure of creation used to value artefacts is the degree of apperception they reveal, their expression of working symbiosis and altruism in the form of institution, and the extend to which these are enhancing to life, at the level of the individual, the family, the community and the society. It is life that endures, not artefacts (McHarg, 1969, p.172)
Before taking up a professorship at the University of Pennsylvania, McHarg spent a brief period employed by the Scottish Department of Health, as a planning officer. In his autobiography, he suggests that the influence of “the brilliant mind of that Edinburgh biologist-turned-planner, Sir
Patrick Geddes” may have resulted in “the inspired unity of medicine and planning” that located
Scottish planning within the Department of Health” (McHarg, 1996, p.93).
McHarg saw the link between appropriate participation in natural process, or design with nature, and the phenomenon of health. In the last chapter of Design with Nature he asked:
“If fitness and unfitness subsume creativity and destructiveness, then can these two terms, in turn, be subsumed under health and disease? Indeed, are not these terms simply different facets of two phenomena that represent polar extremes – the first creativity-fitness-health, the other reduction-unfitness-disease?” He concluded: “If health is indeed a synthesis of the factors of creativity and fitness, then we have at hand a tool of inordinate value for both diagnosis and prescription.” McHarg firmly believed: “Where is the environment of health – physical, mental and social? There is the environment of the creative and the fit” (McHarg, 1969, p.188). He knew that the intention behind appropriate design is salutogenesis.
Ecological planning seeks to fit consumer and environment. This problem-solving and problem-seeking quest conforms to the definition of health. Ecological planning should be health giving. Success in such planning or fitting should be revealed in the existence of healthy communities, physical, biological, and social system in dynamic equilibrium. However, many persons and institutions may satisfy the definition of health by seeking and solving problems but still succumb to disease and death from causes of which they are ignorant or causes beyond their control. As a result a specialization in health planning has been developed within the realm of human ecological planning. This subscribes to … ecological theory and method … but uses as its viewpoint the degree to which actions by persons, groups, or institutions enhance or diminish health and well being (McHarg, 1981, p.153).
McHarg suggested that healthy ecosystems may contribute to increasing the health of adjacent ecosystems by a process he termed “infectious health”. He asked: “Could infectious health enable healthy systems to cause adjacent lands to recover?” McHarg was hopeful that humanity
The Natural Design Movement 275 could facilitate and rely on nature’s self-healing capacity. He regarded “healing the earth” as
“the primary objective” of all planning and design (in McHarg & Steiner, 1998, p.358).
McHarg ended his autobiography, entitled A Quest for Life, with the following appeal:
Next, we must initiate massive global inventories and both invent and install sensors to provide a continuous monitoring process. From baseline to present, we must observe changes and the operation of constituent processes, particularly biogeochemical cycles. … I can think of no human activity of greater importance. It should be seen as the primary consequence of recognizing the global environment as the principal objective in the world’s agenda. It identifies the most important purpose of the world’s population for now and all time. We must come to know this world, to understand how it works, and to regulate our behaviour to maintain and enhance the biosphere. We must identify the welts, lesions, wounds, and suppurations on the global epidermis. We must learn to green the earth, to restore the earth, to health the earth. I long to live to see it (McHarg, 1996, p.374).
Victor Papanek (1927-1998):
When Victor Papanek published Design for the Real World – Human Ecology and Social
Change, in 1971, he was among the very first mainstream professional product/industrial designers and educators to voice questions concerning design’s social and ecological context since it had emerged as a new creative input to the conception, shaping, production, and marketing of consumer products for a mass market. Papanek saw human design as one expression of life’s interconnected patterning and interactions. To him, human culture was a particular expression of what Alfred North Whitehead called ‘life’s creative exploration of novelty.’
All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act towards a desired, foreseeable end constitutes the design process. Any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself, works counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life. Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto. But design is also cleaning and reorganizing a desk drawer, pulling an impacted tooth, baking an apple, choosing sides for a backlot baseball game, and educating a child (Papanek, 1985, p.3).
In 1971 this was a radical definition of design, since the concept was only beginning to expand from a superficial beautyfication of form and print. Papanek’s definition of design is compatible with the definition used in this thesis: intentionality expressed through interaction
The Natural Design Movement 276 and relationship (see the beginning of chapter one). Papanek called design “the conscious and intuitive effort to impose [adapt to] meaningful order” (Papanek, 1985, p.4). He emphasized:
“Design must be meaningful” (Papanek, 1985, p.6); and tried to place the functionality of any given design within the wider social, ecological, and cultural context by representing the underlying complexity of interactions and relationships in a “function complex” (see Figure
3.1).
Fig. 3.1: Victor Papanek’s ‘Function Complex’ (Reproduced from Papanek, 1985, p.7) ______
Papanek explains: “The Yin-Yang monad appears at each of the six aspects, indicating the soft- hard, feeling-thinking, intuitive-intellectual mix, which determines each of these six evaluative criteria” (Papanek, 1985, p.7). Papanek also addressed the important distinction between a design brief aiming to satisfy a true human need and a design brief that is mainly intent on increasing material consumption and economic growth – human greed or want:
Much recent design has satisfied only evanescent wants and desires, while the genuine needs of man have often been neglected. The economic, psychological, spiritual, social, technological, and intellectual needs
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of a human being are usually more difficult and less profitable to satisfy than the carefully engineered and manipulated “wants” inculcated by fad and fashion (Papanek, 1985, p.15).
Design for the Real World was also the first book to openly criticize the negative impact of some multi-national corporations and their design and marketing strategies on community cohesion and both human and environmental health. “The self-assertive greed of corporations has given us strips of quick-food restaurants in every town or sizable village in the United
States.” Papanek suggested: “The societal and social consequences are clear: a destabilization of the family, new eating patterns that frequently result in obesity and dietary deficiencies, a debasement of the human palate forced to find the lowest common denominator, and finally a ready acceptance for horrendous garishness and visual pollution” (Papanek, 1985, p.25).
Papanek’s analysis identified, in 1971, how this kind of decontextualised design approach of modern fast-food corporations would significantly contribute to the serious public health endemic that bad diets and obesity have now become in many developed countries. He also described the ecological effects of the practices of the fast-food industry, calling it among
“the worst chemical polluters in the world,” and highlighting that the waste streams produced by such inefficient design were profoundly “ecologically damaging” (Papanek, 1985, p.25).
Victor Papanek was also an early advocate for a new role for the industrial designer, as a transdisciplinary integrator and facilitator. He lamented: “the various sciences and technologies have become woefully compartmentalized and specialized;” and suggested: “often, more complex problems can be attacked only by teams of specialists, speaking their own professional jargon.” Papanek believed: “Industrial designers, who are frequently members of such teams, find that, besides fulfilling their normal design function, they must act as communication bridge between other team members” (Papanek, 1985, pp.28-29). He argued:
Many times the designer may be the only one able to speak the various technical jargons; because of his educational background, the role of team interpreter is forced upon him. So we find the industrial designer becoming the team synthesist, a position to which he has been elevated by the default of people from other disciplines (Papanek, 1985, p.29).
Papanek realized that design is not only at the nexus between different academic and professional disciplines, it is also – more importantly – at the nexus between values, needs and ethical choices. “The designer is in a position where difficult moral and ethical choices have to
The Natural Design Movement 278 be made. And there are many different ways of dealing with this ethical dilemma” (Papanek,
1985, p.38). The introduction or at least the open addressing of ethical considerations in design theory is a very important contribution Papanek made to the emerging natural design movement.
The cancerous growth of the creative individual expressing himself egocentrically at the expense of spectators and/or consumer has spread from the arts, overrun most of the crafts, and finally reached into design. No longer does the artist, craftsman, or in some cases the designer operate with the good of the consumer in mind; rather, many creative statements have become highly individualistic, autotherapeutic little comments by the artist to himself (Papanek, 1985, p.40).
This is Papanek’s scathing critique of the cult of the creative individual and individualistic expression in art and design. Since then the cancer has spread further. It currently paralyses the so urgently needed unfolding of design’s enormous potential as humanity’s co-creative expression of life’s continued exploration of novelty. Co-creation celebrates and preserves life’s own vitality – its diversity of individual expression, interaction and relationships. It does so through integration, reciprocity, and community, not through segregation, exploitation, and individualism.
“The designer bears a responsibility for the way the products he designs are received at the marketplace,” but more than that “his social and moral judgment must be brought into play before he begins to design, since he has to make a judgment, and a priori judgment at that, as to whether the products he is asked to design or redesign merit his attention at all. In other words, will his design be on the side of the social good or not” (Papanek, 1985, p.55). To Papanek the social and ecological ‘good’ were not separate but co-dependent. He admitted:
While the reasons for our poisoned air and polluted streams and lakes are fairly complex, industrial designers and industry in general are certainly coresponsible with others for this appalling state of affairs. … The designer-planner shares responsibility for nearly all of our products and tools and hence nearly all our environmental mistakes. He is responsible either through bad design or by default: by having thrown away his responsible creative abilities, by “not getting involved,” or by “muddling through” (Papanek, 1985, 56).
Papanek repeatedly emphasized that “the designer must be conscious of his social and moral responsibility.” He argued: “design is the most powerful tool yet given man with which to shape his products, his environments, and, by extension, himself.” Papanek warned: “The
The Natural Design Movement 279 designer must analyse the past as well as the foreseeable future consequences of his acts”
(Papanek, 1985,p.102).
With regard to the task of awareness raising within industry and among consumers,
Papanek believed: “All design is education of sorts” (Papanek, 1985, p.103. He also highlighted the need for socially inclusive design that considered real needs - not of abstracted and standardized model consumers, but of the elderly, the handicapped, and real communities.
Furthermore, he stressed that design had the potential of playing a crucial role in closing the gaping inequality between developed and many developing nations. Papanek’s approach to design recognized the importance of social cohesion, social inclusiveness, and social, as well as, international equality as a prerequisite for a more sustainable world. The natural design movement operates on the same basic convictions. Papanek also expressed the other central theme of the natural design movement through his belief that in order to learn how to participate appropriately in natural process, we best look toward the natural world for inspiration and appropriate design analogues:
One source that never seems to go out of style is the handbook of nature. Here, through biological and biochemical systems, many of the same problems mankind faces have been met and solved. Through analogues to nature, man’s problems can be solved optimally. … Bionics means the use of biological prototypes for the design of man-made systems. To put it more simply: to study basic principles in nature and then apply these principles and processes to the needs of mankind (Papanek, 1985, p.186).
Much of the remainder of this chapter and a good part of this thesis will explore the concept of nature as a teacher, or natural diversity and processes as a source for inspiration in the creation of ecologically adapted, salutogenic, natural design. The natural design movement - the emergent nature-inspired, nature-adapted, and socially and ecologically salutogenic design approach of the 21st century explored in this thesis - is united by the intention to participate appropriately and therefore sustainably in natural process. In order to do so effectively in the long term, we have to teach designers how to learn from nature and integrate design solutions harmlessly into natural process.
A more durable kind of design thinking entails seeing the product (or tool, or transportation device, or building, or city) as a meaningful link between man and environment. We must see man, his tools, environment, and ways of thinking and planning, as a nonlinear, simultaneous, integrated, comprehensive whole.
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This approach is integrated design. It deals with specialized extensions of man that make it possible for him to remain a generalist. All man’s functions – breathing, balancing, walking, perceiving, consuming, symbol-making, society-generating – are interrelated and interdependent. If we wish to relate the human environment to the psychophysical wholeness of human beings, our goal will be to replan and redesign both function and structure of all the tools, products, shelters, and settlements of man into an integrated living environment, an environment capable of growth, change, mutation, adaptation, regeneration … (Papanek, 1985, pp.293-294).
Papanek emphasized: “If we speak of integrated design, of design-as-a-whole, of unity, we need designers able to deal with the design process comprehensively. Lamentably, designers so equipped are not yet turned out by any school.” He adds: “Their education would need to be less specialized and include many disciplines now considered to be only distantly related to design, if related at all.” Papanek stresses: “Integrated design (a general unified design system) demands that we establish at what level of complexity the problem belongs” (Papanek, 1985, p.295). According to him, such an integrated approach had to consider the historical, social, cultural, human, societal and ecological context of the design in question.
Design, if it is to be ecologically responsible and socially responsive, must be revolutionary and radical in the truest sense. It must dedicate itself to nature’s principle of least effort, in other words, maximum diversity with minimum inventory … or doing the most with the least. This means consuming less, using things longer, and being frugal about recycling materials. The insights, the broad, nonspecialized, interactive overview of a team … that designers can bring to the world must now be combined with a sense of social responsibility. In many areas designers must learn how to redesign. In this way we may yet have survival through design (Papanek, 1985, pp.346-347)
The notion of ‘survival through design’ may sound crass, but at a time in the Earth’s history where the human impact on the planet is undeniably beginning to up-set the dynamics of climate patterns, species extinctions, ecosystem’s health, atmospheric composition, genetic recombination, and soil fertility, it is reasonable to consider design aimed at appropriate participation in natural process as design for survival. The inappropriate and unsustainable design practices which have proliferated since the Industrial Revolution are now threatening the health of the planetary life-support system.
In The Green Imperative – Ecology and Ethics in Design and Architecture, Victor
Papanek described a designer as “a human being attempting to walk the narrow bridge between order and chaos, freedom and nihilism, between past achievements and future possibilities”
(Papanek, 1995, p.7). As a meaning making and consciously co-creative species, Homo sapiens
The Natural Design Movement 281 designans – humans as wise designators and interpreters of meaning - we will have to cross this narrow bridge collectively in the 21st century.
Papanek’s last book, The Green Imperative, picks up many of the themes introduced in
Design for the Real World. It highlights the ethical responsibility of designers to act as educators who “help to guide the intervention of design with nature and mankind”(Papanek,
1995, p.11). At the same time, he proposes a more humble attitude for designers, one that acknowledges the limits of what is humanly knowable in a fundamentally interconnected and unpredictable universe. He suggests this new humility “may be the cardinal point where design practice meets spirituality”(Papanek, 1995, p.12).
In recognition of the ecological limits of our planetary home and our dependence on its life-support systems such humility would naturally lead towards a more respectful engagement with Nature as the sacred ground of our being. A more frugal and careful use of resources and a general intent of appropriate participation in natural process would be characteristic of a more humble attitude to design. Papanek suggested:
Perhaps there should be no special category called ‘sustainable design’. It might be simpler to assume that all designers will try to reshape their values and their work, so that all design is based on humility, combines objective aspects of climate and the ecological use of materials with subjective intuitive processes, and relies on cultural and bioregional factors for its forms (Papanek, 1995, p.12).
Ecology and the environmental equilibrium are the basic underpinnings of all human life on earth; there can be neither life nor human culture without it. Design is concerned with the development of products, tools, machines, artefacts and other devices, and this activity has profound and direct influence on ecology. The design response must be positive and unifying. Design must be the bridge between human needs, culture and ecology (Papanek, 1995, p.29).
…mindfulness, springing from deep roots of aesthetic experience and spiritual awareness, will enrich the work of design, and – by recognizing the proper place of what we do in terms of the ever-present now as well as the lasting – [mindfulness will] help to ensure a future of fleeting episodes that will form a rich web of permanence through continuity (Papanek, 1995, p.246).
Victor Papanek was clearly an influential contributor to the emerging natural design movement.
In The Green Imparative he discussed many important aspects of a more holistically integrated, and ecologically and socially responsible approach to design. He reopens the discussion on ethical responsibility and heralds the emergence of a new aesthetics grounded in ecological,
The Natural Design Movement 282 ethical, cultural, social, and spiritual considerations. Many of the practical details and strategies he addresses will be explored in the following chapters of this thesis.
Before his death in 1998, Papanek predicted what design may, or should be like in the
21st century. The Box below summarizes Papanek’s predictions of how the adoption of a more ecological worldview and consciousness will transform design (see Box 3.1).
Box 3.1: Victor Papanek’s Vision of Ecologically Conscious Design in the 21st Century (Reproduced from Papanek, 1995, p.48)
1. There will be a greater emphasis on quality, permanence and craftsmanship in design products, as people and designers come to understand that obsolescence or bad workmanship waste natural resources that can’t be replaced, and contribute to shortages on a global scale. the style of the future will be based on products that age gracefully, and will be more timeless than the quickly changing fads, trends and fashions of the late 20th century.
2. Designers and manufacturers will need to question the ultimate consequences of a new product being introduced. Questions of profit balances and production quotes are not enough.
3. New product ranges will appear, especially in areas such as catalytic converters, afterburners, scrubbers for factories, air, water and soil-quality monitors. [design for ecological damage prevention and remediation]
4. It will be understood that no design stands on its own: all design has social, ecological, and environmental consequences that need to be evaluated and discussed in a common forum.
5. There must be a greater concern for and a deeper understanding of nature, and this will be a preserving and healing force for the global environment.
He proposed that while there will be some need for “designers who are specialists in ecological design”, yet more importantly: “all design education must be based on ecological methods and ideas.” Papanek predicted that designers will need a basic understanding of the scientific methodologies of a diverse range of biological, physical, and social sciences. “Social and human ecology and philosophy and ethics will form an integral part of this training (Papanek,
1995, p.48).” According to Papanek such a trans-disciplinary education is necessary in order to equip the designers of the future to create a more sustainable human civilisation.
The future of design is bound up with the key role of synthesis between the various disciplines that make up the socio-economic-political matrix within which design operates. … an ecological worldview could change design (Papanek, 1995, p.48).
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3.2) Is Natural Design a Paradox?
Nature must be understood as a reality imagined in different ways by different peoples throughout history (Atwood-Mason, 2000, p.194).
One of the most common goals of ecologists is the attempt to specify and sustain what is natural …[but] ecologists cannot always specify what is “natural” … . Knowing that one is acting in accord with nature is often defined as a condition in existence before the activities of humans who perturbed the system … the definition is flawed, however, both because it excludes humans, a key part of nature, and because there are probably no fully natural environments or ecosystems anywhere. Because natural systems continually change, it is difficult to specify a situation as one particular time, rather than another time, as natural. We are unable to define natural in a way free of categorical values. Shrader-Frechette and McCoy (in McGinnis et al., 1999, p.210).
Our scientific and technological advances have increasingly insulated people from nature, leaving them an idealized and oversimplified conception of it. In urbanized, industrial societies nature can seem to be an abstraction, something separate from daily life; but all human beings ultimately depend on nature for survival (Botkin et al., 2000, p.167).
Nature denaturalised and transformed into an antagonistic artificial environment is a product of the meditations of humanity. It is a product of design. Living, as we do, in artificiality, has ended forever the dream, the fiction of a return to nature, that is, to that moment before our actions transformed our environment and our thinking reified all and everything by the imposition of the invented category (nature). The changes we have made of ourselves and our world are too great. Not only are we now unable to liberate ourselves of the artificial, but the nonartificial, including our biology, depends upon it; it has become “nature” (Fry, 1995, p.193)
Even the most unnatural is Nature … Who does not see Nature everywhere, will see her nowhere in the right way. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Daniel Botkin, the president of the Centre for the Study of the Environment in Santa Barbara, has asked the provocative question: “But if nature is always changing, what is natural? If we wish to return a landscape to its natural condition, which of its many conditions should we choose?” As an experienced ecosystems ecologist, Botkin suggests that we should understand that “for any area there is no single pristine state of nature, as assumed in the balance of nature idea, but rather a set of nature’s designs, each of which may have persisted for a thousand years or more and each of which could be considered natural” (Botkin et al., 2000, p.18).
Clearly, there will be a lot of discussion about whether ‘natural design’ is the right terminology to use in describing the emerging integral, holistic, ecological, salutogenic and scale -linking design movement that aims for appropriate participation and sustainability. In many ways Nature is a loaded term. The concept means different things to different people. I
The Natural Design Movement 284 have already made clear in chapter one, that the broadest definition of nature employed in this thesis sets it equal to ‘all there is.’ Nature is the whole transforming through the interactions and relationships of its parts, or in short, it is the Kosmos.
The original nature that was disclosed and brought to word by the Greeks was later, through two alien powers, de-natured. Once through Christianity, whereby nature was, in the first place, depreciated to [the level of] “the create,” and at the same time was brought into a relation with super-nature (the realm of grace). Then [it was denatured] through modern natural science, which dissolved nature into the orbit of the mathematical order of world-commerce, industrialization, and in a particular sense, machine technology. … We must accordingly leave aside the modern notion of nature, to the extent that we have one in general, …. Martin Heidegger (in McGinnis, 1999, p.64)
The modern notion of nature equates ‘nature’ with the notion of ‘natural environment’ – something outside of ourselves. The New Oxford Dictionary of English defines the word as
“the phenomenon of the physical world collectively, including plants and animals, the landscape and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans and human creations.”
Something is considered ‘natural’ when it exists in or is caused by nature and “not made or caused by humankind” (Pearsall, 1998, p.1235). This clearly shows that the current culturally dominant understanding of humanity’s relationship to nature is one of exclusion and separation by definition – the Cartesian dichotomy of self-versus-world expressed as humanity-versus- nature.
Most definitions of the word ‘design’ refer to an element of forethought, planning or precognition prior to the execution of the design in its material or immaterial form. Design starts with an intention. Since the dominant paradigm, almost exclusively, considers only humanity to possess such higher expression of consciousness, design is regarded as something uniquely human.
From this perspective, the entire concept of Natural Design is paradoxical from the start. How can a human designer ever aspire to design something natural, if all creation by humans is defined as not natural? Conversely, can we ever call the complex patterns, structures, relationships and processes we observe in Nature a design? Is design a uniquely human activity or product? Or, are the regular and intelligible patterns of the natural world – for example the
The Natural Design Movement 285 arrangement of and relationships between the participating elements of a forest or a river ecosystem - also designs?
The answers to these questions depend on whether we take a holistic and participatory perspective or not. In such a perspective, nature is the totality of the Kosmos and human designs are one manifestation of nature’s designs. From this participatory perspective, everything is natural. This does not mean that all human design is appropriate. Human design - the processes, artefacts, and cultures we create - can either participate appropriately (sustainably and salutogenically) in wider natural process or cause inappropriate disruptions to planetary and human health. In this context it is important to keep in mind that the ancient notion of nature as the totality (Kosmos) encompasses the material universe (the cosmos) and the immaterial universe. Hans-Georg Gadamer explains:
The Greek concept of nature consisted in the discovery that the totality is an ordered structure which allows all the processes of nature to repeat themselves and to pass away in determinate configurations. Nature is therefore something which as it were holds its own course, and does so in and of itself. This is the fundamental idea of Ionian cosmology in which all the original cosmogonic conceptions came to fulfilment: in the end the whole mighty harmonious balance of interacting events determines all things as a form of natural justice (Gadamer, 1996, p.36).
This view of nature grants free choice through bestowing all participants with the co-creative power to affect the transformation and evolution of the whole, yet it is predetermined by life’s own autopoietic tendency and the fundamental truth that within an unbroken, interconnected whole everything affects everything else. In becoming conscious of our participatory co- creative agency, we meet the challenge of appropriate, salutogenic, and sustainable participation. It is here where freedom of choice engenders participatory respons-ability. We do have the (karmic) power to be the co-creators of our collective future.
I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live. Deuteronomy 30:19
As participants in nature, neither we nor the effects of our actions can ever be divorced from the larger pattern of interconnection and its cycles of self-maintenance that sustain the continued existence of a diverse and healthy biosphere. During the last three centuries, while the
The Natural Design Movement 286 humanity-versus-nature perspective became more and more culturally dominant, human beings have changed global climate patterns and the atmospheric composition of the planet through the combustion of fossil fuels and the synthesis and production of many tens of thousands of new chemical compounds. Various radio-nucleotides, carcinogens, pathogens, endocrine-disruptors and other pollutants released through our irresponsible and short-sighted actions are now affecting all life forms from pole to pole and are threatening planetary life-support systems. We are significantly affecting the very fabric of life itself.
Since human actions affect the wider natural patterns that contain them and bring about change from the molecular to the planetary scale, and since human created substances like plutonium 238 and 239 will remain harmful for a quarter of a million years, the dichotomy of natural and artificia l is dissolving. Humanities participation in nature affects her at all spatial and temporal scales. So preciously few, if any, regions of the planet have remained free of human intervention and the impact of our actions from afar, that the American author Bill
McKibben, proclaimed The End of Nature (McKibben, 1990, pp.43).
Everything has been affected by the actions of humans and therefore nothing remains, based on a dualistic definition of nature, purely natural. Conversely, in recognizing humanity’s fundamentally participatory involvement in natural process, humans are recognized as natural and so are their creations.
From a perspective that conceives of humanity as participating in, and an expression of natural process, I would be more inclined to suggest that we are closer to the end of humanity than the end of nature. A greatly impoverished nature may persist without humanity – albeit it may not be called by that name any longer, but humanity may not be able to sustain its own continued existence within a greatly impoverished nature.
The deeply interdependent and participatory relationship between humanity and nature makes their classification into two mutually exclusive categories impractical and unfounded at the least, and highly dangerous and destructive at the most, when such distinctions become the foundations of a culture’s guiding paradigm. The ‘humanity-versus-nature’ dichotomy is profoundly unsustainable meta-design!
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In his remarkably comprehensive and insightful book The Passion of the Western Mind
– Understanding the ideas that have shaped our world view, Professor Richard Tarnas (1996) of the California Institute of Integral Studies explores how our conception and perception of nature and our relationship to nature has changed since the time of early Greek philosophy and on through the scholastic period, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, until modern day philosophy and science.
Tarnas emphasizes that “although the Cartesian-Kantian epistemological position has been the dominant paradigm of the modern mind, it has not been the only one;” and argues that with the work of Goethe, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Coleridge, Emerson, as well as Rudolf
Steiner, a diversely expressed but consistent alternative epistemology began to emerge based on the “fundamental conviction that the relationship of the human mind to the natural world was ultimately not dualistic but participatory” (Tarnas, 1996, p.433).
This alternative way of knowing does not contradict the Kantian epistemology, but includes and transcends it. It acknowledge Kant’s assertion that all human knowledge of nature or the world is ultimately determined by subjective principles; “but instead of considering these principles as belonging ultimately to the separate human subject, and therefore not grounded in the natural world independent of human cognition, this participatory conception held that these subjective principles are in fact an expression of the world’s own being, and that the human mind is ultimately the organ of the world’s own process of self-revelation” (Tarnas, 1996, p.434). Tarnas explains:
In this view, the essential reality of nature is not separate, self-contained, and complete in itself, so that the human mind can examine it “objectively” and register it from without. Rather, nature’s unfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of the human mind. Nature’s reality is not merely phenomenal, nor is it independent and objective; rather, it is something that comes into being through the very act of human cognition. Nature becomes intelligible to itself through the human mind. In this perspective, nature pervades everything, and the human mind in all its fullness is itself an expression of nature’s essential being (Tarnas, 1996, p.434).
Tarnas stringently agues that “this participatory epistemology, developed in different ways by
Goethe, Hegel, Steiner and others, can be understood not as a regression to naïve participation mystique, but as the dialectical synthesis of the long evolution from the primordial
The Natural Design Movement 288 undifferentiated consciousness through the dualistic alienation.” Furthermore: “It incorporates the postmodern understanding of knowledge and yet goes beyond it;” since “the interpretative and constructive character of human cognition is fully acknowledged, but the intimate, interpenetrating and all-permeating relationship of nature to the human being and human mind allows the Kantian consequence of epistemological alienation to be entirely overcome” (Tarnas,
1996, p.435).
Owen Barfield (1988) argued that the conceptual negation of the humanity’s “original participation” in the natural world, as inherent in the Cartesian epistemology, causes us to create material idols and believe that the material universe is all there is. It takes human consciousness out of a state of “original participation.” In transcending and including the worldview that creates an object-subject separation between humanity and nature, and in becoming conscious once again of our individual and collective participation in a process that manifest both materially (externally) and immaterially (internally or in consciousness) – we are moving from a culture of idolatry of the material to a conscious culture of “final participation” (Barfield, 1988, pp.133). Sustainable meta-design promotes such participatory awareness, raising awareness of our co-creative responsibilities and thus nurturing an underlying intentionality of appropriate participation.
In a fundamentally interconnected universe every atom in our body is linked to all existing life. Extending our perceptual time horizon, we can begin to understand that as individuals, as participants in life, we are connected to three and a half billion years of life’s evolutionary explorations into complexity and diversity on this planet. Expanding the time horizon even further, we can begin to identify with the fact that through fifteen billion years of universal expansion and evolution, we have arrived at this point in history, at this pattern of organization, complexity and diversity, from the primordial hydrogen atoms expanding outwards after the big bang, at the beginning of time.
Even beyond the material universe, consciousness is an expression of reality’s immaterial and interior dimensions. The uni-verse is a unified whole, materializing and becoming conscious of its own existence through its parts. Joanna Macy, a systems theorist, ecological activist and scholar of Buddhism, embraces this perspective in her work aimed to
The Natural Design Movement 289 reconnect humanity and nature. Through international workshops Dr. Macy helps people to reconnect with their own participatory and co-creative nature. In doing so she engages in highly effective meta-design. She writes:
Let us bring forth the powers and abundance of our evolutionary journey, and imagine we can help to recreate a life affirming world. Let us once again take joy in our bodies and each other, and all our relatives in the more than human world. You and I have lived in harmony with the Earth for millions of years, and this knowledge has not been lost. It is now time to draw on these memories and these strengths, and let new ways emerge…(Macy & Brown, 1998)
The critical meta-design change catalysed by the emerging natural design movement and the common aim of appropriate participation, is the dissolution of the conceptual boundary between humanity and nature. The natural design movement acknowledges the fundamentally interconnected nature of all existence, which integrates humanity as participant into the processes of the natural world and emphasizes our dependence on such processes.
From the perspective of natural design (humanity-in-nature) it becomes paradoxical to consider humanity, its actions and designs, as separate from the natural processes of the biosphere or the conscious processes of the noosphere. Humanity could never be truly separate from nature, since, as a biological specie, humanity could only emerge through the evolutionary process, which ties our history inseparably to the evolution of all living beings and their symbiotic relationships within the cycles that maintain the health of the planetary biosphere.
The dissolution of the humanity-versus-nature dichotomy and a definition of nature that includes humanity as an integral participant, also begs us to reconsider our definition of design and whether it truly is a uniquely human phenomenon that does not occur without human premeditation. Let’s assume that the fundamental telos of the Kosmos, as expressed in ‘life’s continued exploration of novelty,’ is the diversification, flourishing, and continuation of life itself, and with it the continued evolution of consciousness.
From this perspective, the fundamental intentionality behind all natural process is salutogenesis (as defined in chapter two) – the flourishing of the whole. The Vedic scriptures and Mahatma Gandhi referred to this by the Sanskrit term ‘sarvodaya.’ If there is this fundamentally healing, whole -making, becoming (conscious) telos in the universe, then all of nature’s designs are expressions of it –whether human-made or not.
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Tony Fry suggests that if we want to stop the destruction of the natural processes upon which we and life as a whole depends, we have to learn to modify the industrial and the artificial in a way that it sustains life. Fry is convinced that “At worst, in terms of environmental impact, the artificial has to be made benign, while, at best, it has to be made proactive in the conservation of life”(Fry, 1995, p.193). If this is achieved, the artificial, as a creative expression of the natural rather than its dualistic opposite, will once again participate appropriately in natural process.
Human design that integrates humanity into nature without jeopardizing biological diversity and ecosystem health, participates appropriately in natural process. It allows for the multiple synergistic effects, which strengthen local ecosystems and thereby increase the overall diversity and resilience at all scales, which in turn improves the health of the biosphere. This cycle of health generation links all scales into a resilient and diversely expressed whole - the continued evolution of all life.
The paradox of natural design dissolves, once human designs reconnect with the wellspring of our own biological existence and participate in and support Nature’s own, age-old design strategies. This will occur, once we become humanity-in-nature again – but this time fully conscious of our own co-creative agency. Once we consciously and responsibly participate – as nature’s designs - together with the community of all life, in the way Nature designs herself, all our designs will be natural and sustainable designs.
A universal beauty showed its face; The invisible deep-fraught significances, Here sheltered behind form’s insensible screen, Uncovered to him their deathless harmony And the key to the wonder-book of common things. In their uniting law stood up revealed The multiple measures of the uplifting force, The lines of the World-Geometer’s technique, The enchantments that uphold the cosmic web And the magic underlying simple shapes.
Sro Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950)
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3.3) Eco-literacy, Ethics and Aesthetics in Natural Design
Real ecological literacy is radicalising in that it forces us to reckon with the roots of our ailments, not just their symptoms. For this reason, I think it leads to a revitalization and broadening of the concept of citizenship to include membership in a planetwide community of humans and living things (Orr, 1992, p.88)
It is not enough to have a handful of heroes, what we need are generations of responsible people. Richard D. Lamm (in Chiras, 1992, p.42)
Ecology may differ from painting less in its purpose or even in its methodology than in the symbols it uses and in the questions it asks. Ecology, like poetry and art, may help us perceive and appreciate what is wonderful in nature and, therefore, make us more willing to protect magnificent ecosystems for their own sake (Sagoff, 1992, p.61).
A bad solution is bad because it acts destructively upon the larger pattern in which it is contained. It acts destructively upon those patterns, most likely, because it is formed in ignorance or disregard of them. Wendell Berry (in Orr, 1992, p.61)
Being ecologically literate – to be aware of the complex web of interactions and relationships that underlies the dynamics of ecosystems and the biosphere …- changes how nature and our role within its processes is perceived. Such a change in perception has important ethical and aesthetic implications (Wahl, 2005b, p.2).
Mark Sagoff has asked the question: “Has Nature a Good of Its Own?” He emphasized that
“we cannot usefully define ecological ‘health’ or ‘integrity’ simply in terms of ecological
‘authenticity’ – that is, in terms of the independence of natural from cultural history.” Sagoff believes that “we must develop a conception of health that is compatible with the cultivation and use of nature but that does not collapse into maximization of instrumental value” (Sagoff,
1992, p.69).
By recognizing nature’s intrinsic values and the fundamental interconnectedness between human cultural evolution and natural evolution, and “by preserving the health and integrity of these species and communities, we ourselves sink our roots in the land we inhabit: we ourselves become native to a place” (Sagoff, 1992, p.69). Through recognizing or re- creating our communities and cultures as natives of particular places “the value we attach to them goes to our identity more than to our interests – to who we are, not just what we want”
(Sagoff, 1992, p70).
In identifying ourselves and our cultures as simultaneously shapers of nature and shaped by nature, as participants in natural process and an integral part of nature, “the health and
The Natural Design Movement 292 integrity of ecosystems becomes a necessary condition of our own health and integrity.” Sagoff warns: “…if we do not value nature for ethical and aesthetic reasons, then we might well pollute and degrade it for instrumental ones.” He suggests that by recognizing natural process as a setting for collective ethical and aesthetical judgement “the concepts of ecological integrity and health make sense” (Sagoff, 1992, p.70). Sagoff argues:
“Our evolutionary heritage – the diversity of species, the miracle of life – confronts us with the choice … whether to butcher nature for the market or to protect its health and integrity as objects of moral attention and aesthetic worth” (Sagoff, 1992, p.70).
Through becoming ecologically literate, people cultivate an awareness of their own fundamental interconnectedness and interdependence with all of nature. This leads to an expansion of the individual’s horizon of ‘self’-identification, compassion, and care. Through eco-literacy we learn to identify with a larger ecological self by acknowledging our own natural-ness. This in turn will lead us to perceive anything that is destructive or harmful to natural process as aesthetically jarring; and ethically questionable. Appropriate participation in natural process becomes a guiding intentionality, since it is not only ethically responsible, but also in our individual, enlightened self-interest.
Human designs are goal-directed responses to a certain way of perceiving reality. At the same time, a design once created, also co-creates and thereby influences future design decisions based on that reality (Wahl, 2005b, p.2).
In chapter one it was established that design is fundamentally worldview dependent. A change in worldview – moving to a different position on the Spiral Dynamics map of value systems – will literally change how we see ourselves and our relationship to our community and the wider world. Such a shift in perception has profound effects on our ethical and aesthetic judgement, and therefore on how we act and design.
According to Fritjof Capra, “the major problems of our time … are all different facets of one single crisis, which is essentially a crisis of perception.” Capra argues that sustainability requires an “ecological awareness” that “recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the embeddedness of individuals and society in cyclical process of nature”
(Capra, 1994).
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Ecological literacy creates ecological awareness in people. It makes them aware of the fundamental dependence of all culture on the planet’s ecological life-support systems. Such a shift in perception would radically re-contextualize design - why and how we are creative:
Human inventions and capabilities (for both good and ill – as always) are increasing at a furious pace. Managing the torrent in a way that avoids serious insult to society and the rest of nature is proving to be difficult. As awareness of the effects of our actions sharpens, we must now ask the uncomfortable question: can art, craft or design be truly worthwhile and wonderful if it engenders an environmental mess and ruined lives elsewhere? (Baldwin, 1998, p.1)
J. Baldwin expresses the chain-reaction that flows from an increased ecological awareness. In becoming conscious of the wider context in which we are co-creative and in facing the complexity of how our design does affect human and planetary futures, we cannot but readdress fundamental questions about ethics and aesthetics. Anthony Cortese argues:
Because all members of society consume resources and produce pollution and waste, it is essential that all of us understand the importance of the environment to our existence and quality of life and that we have the knowledge, tools, and sense of responsibility to carry out our daily lives and professions in ways that minimise our impact on the environment (Cortese, 1992).
Through realizing that the dualistic separation between humanity and nature is purely conceptual and that in reality we are fundamentally co-creative – and therefore co-responsible participants, we have to face the ethical responsibility that goes hand in hand with such participatory and co-creative empowerment. “Responsibility can no longer be deferred to government or industry alone; it has to be assumed by each and every individual. Everyday, civil society has to make choices that can either increase or decrease the ability of future generations to lead a humane and healthy life” (Wahl, 2005b, p.6). In order to make appropriate choices on how to participate, humanity has to become ecologically literate (see also chapter five on education).
In the beginning of this chapter I have explored the fact that among traditional and indigenous cultures ecological awareness is the rule, rather than the exception. Within the modern Western cultural context, it was the conservation ecologist Aldo Leopold, who provided the first modern formulation of an ecological and environmental ethic.
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Leopold proposed that: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community; it is wrong when it does otherwise” (Leopold,
1966). He pointed out that ethics is essentially not only a philosophical but also an ecological
‘process’. Ethics ultimately concerns the relationship between individuals and the collective in aiming to define appropriate participation.
Leopold warned: “The extension of ethics to include man’s relationship to the environment” was an “evolutionary possibility” but an “ecological necessity.” He explains:
“An ethic ecologically, is a limitation of freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from antisocial conduct.” Leopold continues: “These are two definitions of one thing which has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals and groups to evolve modes of cooperation” (Aldo Leopold, 1949, quoted in McHarg, 1964, p.29). Ethics guides modes of participation by promoting equality, personal and collective responsibility, cooperation and symbiosis.
Ethics in its wider context is not only about guiding human interactions within exclusively human communities. A solely philosophical ethic, considered only within the social and cultural dimension, is often abused for moralizing from the position of a single cultural and societal context and set of values. The wider function of ethics - its ecological imperatives - extends beyond anthropocentric concerns (Wahl, 2005b, p.8).
Ethical debates tend to be limited to their philosophical and anthropocentric dimensions if the eco-centric and world-centric perspective higher up the value or worldview spiral described by
Graves, Beck and Cowan, and Wilber (see chapter one) are not included. Moving into what
Clare Graves called Second Tier thinking, that ‘momentous leap’ in human nature, is the
“evolutionary possibility” referred to by Aldo Leopold above. To recognize the ecological dimension of ethics by becoming aware of our participation in the more-than-human community of life on Earth is an ecological necessity if our aim is to maintain human and planetary health.
The Australian eco-designer and design theorist Tony Fry stresses that designers can no longer absolve themselves from their ethical responsibilities, by deferring such responsibilities to their clients. Beyond a basic code of professional conduct and professional due diligence, the ethical implications of any design need to be discussed during early stages of the design process, and they need to be considered not only within an anthropocentric - often economically
The Natural Design Movement 295 dominated - context, but aim to preserve ecological, social, and cultural value and expand ethical considerations to a more bio-centric view. Fry proposes: “an ethics of now, crucially needs to confront our anthropocentric being as a structurally unethical condition” (Fry, 2004).
The German designer and design educator Bernd Löbach traces the ethical implications of various ethical identifications from egocentrism, via anthropocentrism and biocentrism to cosmocentrism, in his article “Theoretischer Hintergrund ökologieorientierten Designs”
(Theoretical Background of Ecologically Oriented Design, see Löbach, 1995). Patrick Curry has recently provided a similar summary in English (see Curry, 2006).
In Löbach’s opinion, all designers need to confront these various ethical positions and their corresponding value systems, since such a confrontation provides the basis for orienting their own actions and allows them to assume and defend responsible positions through their own arguments and creative actions (Löbach, 1995, p.85).
A designer, who wants to engage in environmentally aware product design, requires a mental background that can guide his professional practice. A conceptual framework that draws not only on political ecology and systems theory, but importantly on environmental ethics and value theory. Ethics and value theory have always been part of philosophy. While the empirical sciences separate our societal reality into distinct, subject-specific fields, philosophy deals with existence as a whole and asks questions about the meaning of being alive. A philosophical approach offers a particularly stimulating perspective to designers that enables them to holistically reflects upon living process, and to base their design parameters on the insights gained (Löbach, 1995, p.82)
Daniel Chiras argues: “Living within the Earth’s means is the bottom line of a sustainable society” (Chiras, 1992, p.26). He emphasizes that the transformation towards a sustainable society will require us to confront ethical questions in a new light and develop a practical and directive system of sustainable ethic s.
In our modern western societies that have grown accustomed to utopian notions like unbound material progress, unlimited growth, separateness, and control, any ethical system advertising a fundamental need for human restraint will be challenged immediately as a threat to human progress.
As Chiras points out, it would be more appropriate to regard a sustainable ethics “as an attempt to re-establish synergy in an era of unprecedented social and ecological disruption.” He emphasizes that sustainable ethics seek “to redirect human progress, not to stop it” (Chiras,
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1992, p.27). The box below contains a summary of Chiras’ formulation of four directive principles of a sustainable ethics (see Box 3.2).
Box 3.2: The Four Directive Principles of a Sustainable Ethics: (Reproduced; summarized, and adapted from Chiras, 1992, pp.27-31)
THE EARTH HAS A LIMITED SUPPLY OF RESOURCES FOR ALL SPECIES There is not always more and it’s not all for us. The decline of resources underscores the practical importance of this principle and suggests the need for us to act much more responsibly. The most important step in building a sustainable society is to learn to use all resources – renewable and non-renewable alike – more efficiently and to devote greater care to renewable resources, which could supply our future demands for fuel, food, and building materials ad infinitum if carefully managed. The Earth’s resources belong to all species, not just humans. The role of human beings is not that of self-interested stewards of the planet, but rather that of active participants in maintaining its health for all those who share the wealth.
HUMANS ARE PART OF NATURE; SUBJECT TO ITS LAWS As proposed by James Lovelock, planet Earth can be understood as a giant self-regulating organism, in which a wide variety of interacting processes ensure that conditions remain relatively stable within a dynamic equilibrium of planetary conditions that allow for the continued existence of higher life-forms on earth. All living things – including humans – are part of a single collective known as the biosphere. We are intricately tied to the rest of the living world. Almost 400 years ago, the poet Edmund Spenser said that nature is both a mother and a judge. She gives us life, but she insists on justice. If we destroy the ozone layer, for example, we destroy ourselves. If we pollute our ground water, we pollute our bodies. If we deplete our forests, we foreclose the entire human race.
OUR FUTURE DEPENDS ON COOPERATION For years, humans have wrestled to make nature do their biding. Today, it is becoming clear that domination often leads to desecration. Even though conflict will always exists between the human and the natural world, it cannot continue at the current pitch without a heavy cost to nature and to human survival. Creating a sustainable future depends on ways to enhance cooperation. Cooperation is a tall order for a society whose sense of vulnerability to nature’s forces has created a powerful urge to control. In a cooperative society, one that lives within the limits of nature, this sense of vulnerability should cause us to challenge our basic assumptions.
ALL LIFE DEPENDS ON A HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT Maintaining the integrity and proper functioning of the global ecosystem should be a fundamental value in a sustainable society. Since human health depends on a healthy environment, planet care is the ultimate form of self-care. But a healthy ecosystem is paramount not just to our own survival but to the survival of all species. To ensure a health environment, we must act with compassion. A modern sustainable society needs to learn to consider the impact of its present actions on the needs of future generations. It would do well to follow the example of the Iroquois nation and consider decisions with the seventh unborn generation in mind.
The four directive principles suggested by Chiras as a basis for a sustainable ethics reflect the central themes explored in this thesis. They are yet another formulation of the main lessons associa ted with becoming more ecologically literate and therefore more able to take design decisions from a more eco-centric or world-centric perspective.
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An increased awareness of the extent of our dependence on the ecological, hydrological, atmospheric and geological processes of the biosphere would clearly support a more biocentric and holistic position and demonstrate the limited moral and mental horizon of the anthropocentric position. Eco-literacy is the basis of an informed ecological ethic. Ethics based on eco-literacy can guide appropriate participation. Ethics are about the appropriate integration and creative participation of the individual in the collective. Ethics are about conviviality at the level of the family, the community, society, and the extended community of life (Wahl, 2005b, p.9).
Chiras emphasizes the importance of the notion of “intergenerational equity.” He refers to work by Professor Edith Brown-Weiss at the ‘School of International and Environmental Law’ of
Georgetown University. Brown Weiss suggests: while “each generation has certain rights and obligations,” it is important to keep in mind that “we hold the natural and cultural environment in common with all past and future generations. … Intergenerational equity therefore calls on us to view the natural world much like a priceless heirloom” (Chiras, 1992, p.36). Chiras continues: “Passed to us from previous generations, this heirloom must be preserved and protected so that it can be delivered to future generations in the same or better condition.
Intergenerational equity requires a view of the human community as a partnership of generations” (Chiras, 1992, p.36).
While, in the context of long-term sustainability the consideration of inter-generational equity is of utmost importance, in order to create a sustainable civilization in the here and now, we have to pay even greater attention to intra-generational equity and begin to plan and design in ways that reduce endemic national and international inequalities with regard to access to basic resources and the means to meet basic human needs. This has to be done within the limits of local ecosystems and the biosphere.
Together, intergenerational and intragenerational equity constitute social justice. They expand human concern into the future and across a wider geographic range. Also needed, however, is a doctrine of ecological justice. Ecological justice asserts that the Earth is held in common by all species, past and present. Accordingly, we have an obligation to protect it, not just for people but for all living things. Ecological justice is essential to the health of the planet and the health of human society (Chiras, 1992, p.36).
Ecological and social justice are the two fundamental core values of a sustainable civilization.
Equity, with regard to equal access to natural resources, education, information and political representation, is a precondition for such justice. Chiras reports that Professor Weiss’ favoured
The Natural Design Movement 298 strategy for bringing about intergenerational equity begins with the formulation of an internationally supported, formal declaration of ecological and social justice. The International
Green Cross, an institution that was founded with the support of the former Soviet president
Michail Gorbachov, created such a document in The Earth Charter (see www.earthcharter.org).
A further consideration of an ecological ethics is to focus on how to approach conflict resolution between species. Ecological justice requires us to find constructive ways to solve interspecies conflict. Chiras speaks of the balancing act of “weighing the needs of the present against those of the future” and suggests that the five principles for conflict resolution between humanity and nature, as proposed by the philosopher Paul Taylor, may also serve in solving potential intergenerational conflicts. “Taylor’s principles are self-defence, proportionality, minimum wrong, distributive justice, and restitutive justice” (Chiras, 1992, p.38). The box below summarizes Chiras’ interpretation of these principles (see Box 3.3).
Box 3.3: Principles for Interspecies and Intergenerational Conflict Resolution (After Paul Taylor; reproduced, summarized, and adapted from Chiras, 1992, pp.39-41)
THE PRINCIPLE OF SELF-DEFENCE In any real conflict it is permissible for an organism to defend itself if attacked by another organism. Under such conditions, it is acceptable for an organism to protect its own life by killing the attacker. Unfortunately, self-defence is often abused.
THE PRINCIPLE OF PROPORTIONALITY The principle of proportionality applies in situations in which non-vital human desires conflict with the vital needs of other organisms. For example, cutting tropical forests to make disposable chopsticks for the Japanese fast-food market. The principle of proportionality helps temper the impulse to treat other organisms and ecosystems as instruments to serve human fancy. This principle gives greater weight to the essential needs of an organism than to the nonvital needs of a human.
THE PRINCIPLE OF MINIMUM WRONG The principle of minimum wrong or harm asserts that if you must do something, incur the least damage. It means finding the least damaging way of meeting human needs. In tropical rain forest that means replanting forests and creating a sustainable timber harvest. We need to find the least polluting forms of energy, minimum impact food systems, and minimum impact transportation systems.
THE PRINCIPLE OF DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE The principle of distributive justice recommends choosing options that free up resources for other people and wild species. By meeting our needs more efficiently, we leave more for others - both human and non-human, in this and future generations.
THE PRINCIPLE OF RESTITUTIVE JUSTICE Humans must pay restitution for past wrongs. According to the principle of restitutive justice many of the remaining wilderness ecosystems should be preserved as a form of compensations to the species inhabiting them, who have already lost so much habitat. Restitutive justice requires that we restore the peregrine falcon population and save the grizzly and the world. Restitutive justice suggests that we have been living rent free on the planet for tool long. The time to pay back is now.
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A sustainable ethics is necessarily a world-centric rather than an anthropocentric ethics, as it recognizes the fundamental interconnectedness and interdependence between humanity and the rest of nature. Chiras reiterates that an eco-centric view, while foreign to many people in modern societies, is actually expressing a very ancient understanding. “It has been an integral part of the philosophy of Native Americans, Zen Buddhists, Taoists, and even some pre-
Socratic Greek societies. For thousands of years, in fact, mystics have spoken of the unity of all things, living and nonliving” (in Chiras, 1992, p.43). Chiras concludes:
In general, sustainable ethics calls for a much deeper understanding of nature and a much wider appreciation and respect for it. To adherents of sustainable ethics, nature is not a stage upon which all human activity takes place, but rather a fabric into which all human life is woven. This ethics, therefore, contrasts sharply with the prevalent frontierist view of nature as a source of human wealth and the repository of our waste. It stands in sharp contrast to frontier thinking because it places humans within the realm of nature, rather than the hub of a wheel with everything else – birds, mammals, insects, plants – lying outside of our narrow ethical range. As such, sustainable ethics is a philosophy of inclusion and participation, markedly different from the philosophy of alienation and domination of frontierism ( Chiras, 1992, p.43)
In a recent article, entitled ‘Reconciling Eco-Ethics and Aesthetics in Design,’ Jack Elliott reiterates some of the points discussed above. Like Bateson, Capra, McHarg, Leopold, and others, Elliott is also convinced that “in order for real change to occur in human-nature relationships, all living things must be brought into the orbit of ethical consideration.” He adds:
“This requires human empathy to extend beyond our corporal shell. The ethical domain must be reframed from the anthropocentric to the biocentric”. Elliot points out that: “empathy is an important form of knowing, especially as it pertains to the aesthetic subject” (Elliott, 2004, p.5).
An expansion of empathy towards the perceived ‘object’ will change aesthetic experience profoundly. Expanding our empathy towards the living world, when combined with ecological literacy, results in ecological consciousness and solves what Capra referred to as the crisis of perception. This change in perception, based on a change in worldview, lies at the beginning of the path towards sustainability.
How we perceive, especially our relationship with the world, is the determinant of our aesthetic experience. Nicolas Bouriaud speaks of a ‘relational aesthetics’ (see Bouriaud, 1998) and Jale Erzen equates this term with ecological aesthetics, since ecology is about
The Natural Design Movement 300 interdependence and relationship and such exchanges and relations always depend on mutual perception and thus on aesthetics. Erzen argues: “Aesthetics and ecology can be said to be complementary and interdependent” (Erzen, 2004, p.22).
The German artist Herman Prigann traces the root of the environmental problems to our
“inability to understand the dialogue between nature and culture that defines their relationship through mutual dependence” (Prigann, 2004, p111). In his opinion, the undeniable environmental problems we face demand “a new capacity for aesthetic judgement” (Prigann,
2004, p. 75). Prigann emphasizes: “It is not ecology that needs an aesthetic treatment, instead the aesthetic follows ecological insights. Nature does not need an aesthetic domestication”
(Prigann, 2004, p.180). He describes the shift in perception mediated by this ecological aesthetic insightfully:
An ecological aesthetic would be a perspective on our environment and society as well as the ensuing theory and practice. This perspective would annul current, standard contradictions such as nature – art // nature – technology // nature – civilization // nature – culture and proceed towards an insight of the principle of dialogue in and towards everything (Prigann, 2004, p.180).
Echoing Gregory Bateson’s search for ‘the pattern that connects’, Prigann suggests: “Aesthetics is the recognition of the pattern that connects everything.” He believes: “Through attentiveness to pattern, that connection in everything – the universal togetherness – evolves an aesthetic perspective of perception”. He calls for an ecologically based aesthetic that “emphasises the demand to direct attentiveness of our perception towards the living, the living pattern of nature”
(Prigann, 2004, p.181).
Hermann Prigann clearly understands the importance of ecological literacy and he also understands that such literacy would not be solely based within a scientific paradigm. To the contrary, it would gain part of its strength through the intuitive and creative dimensions of aesthetic practice. Ecological literacy is a very important aspect of a multi-perspective based approach to sustainable design. Together with the emergence of the natural design movement, we can observe an increasing debate on the significance of a new ecological aesthetics.
Gregory Bateson alluded to this when he suggested that many of us “have lost that sense of unity of the biosphere and humanity that would bind and reassure us all with an
The Natural Design Movement 301 affirmation of beauty” (in Jack-Todd, 2005, p.192). The Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg asked the important question: ‘What is Beauty?’ In an article with that title he explains:
Even in antiquity there were two definitions of beauty which stood in a certain opposition to one another. The controversy between them played a great part, especially during the Renaissance. The one describes beauty as the proper conformity of the parts to one another, and to the whole. The other, stemming from Plotonius, describes it, without any reference to parts as the translucence of the eternal splendor of the ‘one’ through the material phenomena. … Beauty is therefore involved with the age-old problem of the ‘one’ and ‘many’ which occupied – in close connection with the problem of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ – a central position in early Greek philosophy (Heisenberg, 1997, p.26).
Betty and Theodore Roszak have offered the concept of “deep form” as a way of expressing a new aesthetic understanding of human culture as a participatory expression of natural process.
“By ‘Deep Form’ we mean the correspondence between formative processes of mind and formative processes in nature;” and quote Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s assertion that “great works of art are works of nature just as truly as mountains, streams, and plains” (in Roszak &
Roszak, 1997, p.73). They explain:
Deep Form offers the artist a new repertory of gestures: instead of grasping, seizing, mastering, struggling, it attempts a tender touching, a non-interfering gaze, a receptive bonding with earth and the other. The dark, submerged feminine reappears as image and informing spirit, a new anima mundi with her rich welter of sensuous experience in colour, scent, and sound. Wherever Deep Form wells up among the poets, painters, the architects, the performers, life is made whole again and the universe becomes alive. The creative imagination returns us to an aesthetic both old and new, to a mode of knowing the natural world which can be the ally of science. The human again becomes an integral part of nature; life and mind become part of a vital matrix as vast and as old as the universe. This primary ecological insight views human art not as an anomaly or arbitrarily fashionable decoration, but as integral to the natural order, the common root being inherent formative processes at work at every level of reality from the structure of atoms to the formation of galactic clusters (Roszak & Roszak, 1997, p.78).
In an article addressed to landscape architects, Ian McHarg expressed how ecological literacy can lead to a radically different and participatory understanding of form and a new aesthetic of appropriate participation. In this aesthetic perception, the maker and the made are recognised as fundamentally interdependent:
By being, the place or the creature has form. Form and process are indivisible aspects of a single phenomenon. The ecological method allows one to understand form as an explicit point in evolutionary process. … Lou Kahn has made clear to us the distinction between form and design. Cup is form and begins from the cupped hand. Design is creation of the cup, transmuted by the artist, but never denying its
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formal origins. As a profession, landscape architecture has exploited a pliant earth, tractable and docile plants to make much that is arbitrary, capricious, and inconsequential. We could not see the cupped hand as giving form to the cup, the earth and its processes are giving form to our work. The ecological method is then also the perception of form, and insight to the given form, implication for the made form which is to say design, and this … may be its greatest gift (McHarg, 1967, pp,217-218)
The German cultural historian, Hildegard Kurt, argues that we are in search of a new “aesthetics of sustainability” that expresses itself on the one hand through “forms of the less,” but at the same time through “nature-friendly opulence” (Kurt, 2004, p.238). She emphasizes that such a new aesthetic will “grant a constructive productive force to sensual awareness and aesthetic competence, and use this force for designing life-sustaining futures” (Kurt, 2004, p.238).
Kurt stresses the important role that a participatory awareness plays in the development of such an aesthetic of sustainability. Since the path of learning about appropriate participation that embodies sustainability has to be walked by the vast majority of the human population in order to bring about the desired result of a sustainable future, Kurt does well in emphasizing:
“An aesthetics of sustainability will always be an aesthetics of participation as well – or will have to become one” (Kurt, 2004, p.239). She identifies another important point:
When the discourse about the aesthetics of sustainability articulates a new sensitivity to the fact that there is effective creative knowledge beyond technical-instrumental reason, that offers viable alternatives, then the question of the relationship between sustainability and art can no longer be ignored. But it is at precisely this point that difficulties in understanding presently arise (Kurt, 2004, p. 239).
Aesthetics play such an important role because aesthetic questions direct awareness towards perception itself rather than detached observation. Aesthetics can raise awareness of the role that our knowledge plays in the way we experience and conceptualise the world. Aesthetics is about perception, which emerges out of the encounter of direct sensory experience and mental patterns of thought, concepts and basic assumptions (see also Bortoft, 1996). In David Fideler’s heuristic dialogue Cosmology, Ethics, and the Practice of Relatedness, one of the fictitious philosophers recalls the goal of many Renaissance philosophers: “reading the Book of Nature.”
He muses:
Yes, that is exactly what I would like to do. Rather than pulling away from reality, I would like to read the Book of Nature. For ideas are not entirely abstract things, but they are embodied in the fabric of the world
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and living things. If we can learn how to see ideas and relations embodied in living things, then the world will become transparent, and we can learn how to see other levels of being shining through the forms of nature (Fideler, 1997, p.99).
To ‘read in the Book of Nature’ and the aim to create designs of appropriate participation in natural process is what unites the diverse contributors to the emerging natural design movement.
Rather than the aesthetics of separation and abstraction, it is an aesthetics of relationships and interactions that informs such ecologically conscious design. One of the early voices of the natural design movement, the poet and ‘life-style’ designer Ralph Waldo Emerson, explored the subject of natural beauty as follows:
Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy. The cell of the bee is built at that angle which gives the most strength with the least wax; the bone or the quill of the bird give the most alar strength with the least weight … There is not a particle to spare in natural structures. There is a compelling reason in the uses of the plant, for every novelty of colour or form …(in Fideler, 1997, p.128).
In describing the aesthetics of appropriateness and resource frugality he observed in the natural world, was Emerson not also describing principles of nature inspired bionic design? The following subchapter will focus on learning from nature. The current focus is to explore what the emerging ecological aesthetics may look like and aim to express. One of the philosophers in
Fideler’s imaginary dialogues explains the ecoliteracy – ethics – aesthetics connection:
As Plato argues in the Philebus, the Good by its very nature radiates the essence of Beauty. But when we work against nature’s harmonies and good patterns of sharing, inefficiency, wastefulness, and ugliness result. This points has a lot of implications not only for ethics, but also in terms of our economic models and business practices. … The Stoics believed that excellence is achieved by “following the path of nature.” Interestingly, there is an emerging field of ecological design which is devoted to this very idea. The ecological designers wisely maintain that we need to emulate nature’s own patterns of sharing, and intelligently integrate our human activities within the greater system of the biosphere. Nature possesses a vast, untapped repository of design intelligence! I am sure that we have a lot to learn from her, but it all depends on our ability to approach the world with a renewed sense of vision and insight. And also perhaps with a sense of humility, since living systems are so much more efficient than anything we’ve been able to devise (in Fideler, 1997, p.129).
Briggs and Peat suggest: “Chaos theory is as much about aesthetics as it is about science.”
While they emphasize that chaos theory is not art, they argue that it does point in a similar direction: “the direction we find in the healing images of nature, the direction in which lies our effort to contact the secret ingredient of the Universe we call spirit” (Briggs & Peat, 1999,
The Natural Design Movement 304 p.124). The sense of humility that accompanies the ecologically literate awareness of our own fundamentally participatory involvement in an unpredictable and uncontrollable process facilitates the re-emergence of the ancient perspective that regards nature as the sacred ground of our being.
Painters, poets, and musicians have long known that creativity blossoms when they are participating in chaos. Old fashioned logic and linear reasoning clearly have their place, but the creativity inherent in chaos suggests that actually living life requires something more. It requires an aesthetic sense – a feeling of what fits, what is in harmony, what will grow and what will die. Making a pact with chaos gives us the possibility of living not as controllers of nature but as creative participators (Briggs & Peat, 1999, p.9).
In a paper entitled Between Art and Nature, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer defined art as
“the totality of skills and abilities which is known to us all and which can be seen as the special and dangerous gift which has been bequeathed to mankind.” He emphasizes: “I mean ‘art’ here in the sense of the ancients, as techne, that knowledge and knowing ability which Greek antiquity first developed in the direction of those skills and sciences which today embrace the world” (Gadamer, 1996, p.84).
Gadamer refers to one of the Platonic dialogues in which Socrates teaches his student
“that we cannot know anything about the human soul, or even anything about the human body, without already knowing something of the whole, the holon of nature.” Gadamer explains:
“For those who know Greek this word has a special ring. It is not simply equivalent to our
German expression das Ganze, meaning the whole or the entirety. For holon is also that which is intact or undamaged, that which is sound and healthy.” Gadamer continues: “It is simply the process, which, by virtue of its own self-contained and self-producing living power, finds its place within the totality of nature” (Gadamer, 1996, p.88).
Gadamer is formulating a participatory aesthetic of appropriate participation and health in his description of the relationship between art and nature. To him, recovery of health means not only return of the “vital functions involved in life which someone who has been sick must learn to coordinate once again. It also means meeting the challenge of finding the way back from the condition of social disruption which illness entails.” He concludes: “ herein lies our real task: to recognize our unique position between nature and art, to recognize that we are both
The Natural Design Movement 305 natural creatures and yet in possession of special abilities” (Gadamer, 1996, p.89). Gadamer explains:
Plato distinguishes between two different kinds of measure. The first is that which is used when one wants to take a measurement and the procedure is brought to the object from without. The second is the measure which is to be found within the object itself. The Greek expressions here are metron for the first sort of measure and metrion for the second. In German we speak of ‘das Angemessene’, of what is appropriate or fitting. What does ‘appropriate’ mean here? Clearly in the present context it refers to that inner measure which is proper to a self-sustaining living whole. And we do in fact experience health in this way as a condition of harmony or an appropriate state of internal measure (Gadamer, 1996, pp.98-99).
The emerging aesthetics of health and complexity is an aesthetic of appropriate participation informed by ecological literacy and perceived within an ecological consciousness. In the introduction to John Lane’s book, Timeless Beauty, Kathleen Raine argues that none of Plato’s three verities – the Good, the True, and the Beautiful – can be understood properly “in terms of the materialist values of modern Western civilization, and beauty least of all.” She stresses that
“beauty cannot be quantified or measured in material terms” (in Lane, 2003, p.8). Lane himself writes:
Ugliness reveals monotony, disfiguration, discord, deformation, moral perversion, power abuse, intimidation, emotional torture, no thought and no responsiveness. It gives expression to the breaking down of relationships, proportional symmetries and concordances. It produces an awareness of the horror of belonging to a broken unity. It is impersonal and soul-less. It results from disrespect, cynical disregard and an anti-reverence that verges on arrogance. Ugliness always has something of human arrogance. Conversely, beauty has to do with care, compassion, spirit, authenticity – it is always moral and honest. Beauty appears wherever soul appears, and ugliness whenever the soul has been anaesthetized (Lane, 2003, p.46).
John Lane’s explorations of the subject of beauty are deeply insightful, but unfortunately I will not be able to describe them here in detail. It includes such lucid statements as: “It is one of beauty’s sweetest attributes that its appreciation slows things down; it can never be savoured in a rush or fret. Quite the opposite; its enjoyment depends on patience, silence, calm, and respect.
And an openness of mind” (Lane, 2003, p.153). Is this why beauty is disappearing from an over-industrialized world caught in a positive feedback loop of the ever faster and faster?
To find our way back to greater sanity we will need to practice a new way of looking at nature: not to learn about her, but to learn from her – to see her as a mentor. To do so we will need to slow down. We will
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need to understand that we are but one voice in the chorus of life on Earth. We will need to quieten the voices of our own self-regarding cleverness. We will need to contemplate the fathomless wonder and beauty of her splendour. Beauty is the keyword here: it is the Open Sesame which unleashes the awe bordering on reverence, the humility and the spirituality that are now needed for the survival of our civilization (Lane, 2003, p.157).
Lane agrees with Simone Weil’s observation that “every true artist has had real, direct, and immediate contact with the beauty of the world, contact that is of the nature of a Sacrament” (in
Lane, 2003, p.158). Beauty is perceived and expressed in its most clear form when the soul of the artists merges with the soul of the world. True and timeless beauty touches the soul and connects us to the scared ground of our own being. John Lane suggests ultimately, “the world will be saved by beauty.” To reconnect to the sacredness of all existence through beauty is “to regain the lost dignity of humankind.” Lane emphasises:
Once faith in our own creativity has been rekindled there is no reason, no excuse, for a day to pass without the pleasure – and the responsibility – of adding to the beauty of the world. And creative opportunities can be found in regard to everything. Every single act can be practised with – or without – imagination. Every single act can be done with care or carelessly. Every single act can add to or detract from the sum of total beauty in our home and district. Those who fail to practice their creativity are not only impoverishing their own existence; they are losing one o fthe deepest springs of our future vitality and hope (Lane, 2003, p.159)
Lane concludes: “It is not only the Earth but we who need to be healed – to become whole again.” He believes that “the quest for beauty can make a significant contribution to that healing;” and adds: “the quality which we call beauty must always grow from the realities of our life: how we live, what we eat, the rooms in which we live and the work we chose to undertake”(Lane, 2003, p.162).
Lane thereby hints at the possibility that the aesthetics of the emerging natural design movement may no longer be an aesthetic centred around the aesthetics of isolated, material objects and products, but rather manifest as a more integral and complex understanding of beauty that describes the lifestyle aesthetics of appropriate participation. Such a lifestyle aesthetic would be expressed materially through products and artefacts that contribute to the total of beauty in the world, by allowing for a healthy manifestation of the diversity of life, and by contributing to human and planetary health.
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Health is, both, an emergent property of and the pattern that connects complex dynamic systems. As explored in chapter one, the holistic sciences are tentatively sketching a map of the world based on the metaphor of complex dynamic systems and the concept of emergent order out of chaos. This map is a fuzzy map that acknowledges limits to what is knowable, to prediction and to control.
An aesthetic of health sensitises us to health generating interactions at the level of the whole of nature. It may help us to trace out the map of relationships and interactions that lead to appropriate participation in salutogenesis at the level of the whole. The aesthetics of health will guide us towards actions and designs that increase the health of the planetary biosphere.
The goal shifts from control and manipulation to appropriate participation.
Interconnectedness sets the context for co-operation rather than competition. This emerging map of the world as a complex dynamic system has its origin in natural science and the ecological realities of natural process, but in acknowledging the limits of instrumental technical reason and emphasising the dynamic and participatory nature of perception and existence, the map is clearly acknowledging the important contribution that non-scientific ways of knowing can make to the dialogue about appropriate participation and thus sustainability. In many ways, the emerging map is also an aesthetic map.
The artist and complexity theorist Timothy Collins defined aesthetics as “the philosophy of ideas and physical perception that informs experience” (Collins, 2004, p. 170).
The aesthetics of complex dynamic systems are rooted in valuing diversity, interconnectedness, and cooperative exchanges or symbiosis as the basis for the dynamic stability of the system.
Such dynamic stability could also be referred to as resilience or health. The process of integrating the artificial through appropriate participation into natural process is informed by an aesthetic of health (Wahl, 2005b,p.13).
The evolution of the natural design movement is a clear indication that a culture of appropriate participation is now emerging. In the long term a culture of sustainability will evolve, unless humanity takes the other route into continued mass extinction that will sooner or later include our own species. An aesthetic of health can aid in choosing the former instead of
The Natural Design Movement 308 the latter option. Timothy Collins describes the new emergent aesthetics that are sensitive to the relationships between diversity, complexity and health insightfully:
Health is a term for the aesthetic understanding of complexity. There is a thread connecting biodiversity, cultural diversity and economic diversity. This is the metaphorical understanding of the health of a complex dynamic system. This is an idea that few of us will ever be able to conceptualise in detail, but I think that many of us are beginning to sense in terms of aesthetic pattern. The relative health of a landscape, an organism, the health of a system, even the health of a technological construct, is a material problem of diverse complexity. … The perception of health is a relative term, it requires intimate knowledge over a period of time and a caring critical attention. In turn, a lack of health can be described in terms of emergent dominant systems that mitigate the constraint of diversity. Diversity is healthy expression and perception is an integrative, dialogic concept. This concept departs from the autonomous object of classical aesthetics, defined as unity, regularity, simplicity, proportion, balance, measure and definiteness. Within the aesthetic perception of diversity lies systemic relationship, dynamism, complexity, symbiosis, contradiction to measurement and indefinite and procreative vitality. I believe that an aesthetic of diversity is emergent but not yet cogent. It is a theoretical view with an experiential basis that must be identified and pursued by many. It will not be captured in terms of a singular theory, a definite practice or primary authorship (Collins, 2004, p. 172).
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3.4) Learning from Nature
If you do not rest upon the good foundations of nature, you will labour with little honour and less profit. Those who take for their standard any one but nature -the mistress of all masters – weary themselves in vain. Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519 (in Schneider, 1995, p.xxx)
Nature should be spelled with a capital ‘N,’ not because Nature is God but because all that we can learn about God we will learn from the body of God, which we call Nature. Frank Lloyd Wright 1867 –1959 (in Whiston-Sprin, 2002, p.30)
Our goal is to create technologies that correspond more fully with human insight, thought, action and communication than technology has done so far. Clearly these will have to take nature as an example. Any technician who thinks long-term has to take nature as his prime example. Claus-Dieter Vöhringer (Head of Research at Daimler-Crysler, in Vester, 2004, p.121)
I do not look to nature as inspiration merely to mimic its forms as other architects have done. I am concerned with the profound intelligence of nature, the how’s and why’s of its designs and living processes, to understand the very mind of nature and the universe to free the heart and mind of man. Eugene Tsui (in Sanosiain, 2003, p.125).
By adopting a concept of Nature that understands natural process as the pattern that connects everything within the biosphere and the universe as an integrated whole, humanity and its cultural and technological expressions are recognized as being situated within the larger context of natural process. Cultural diversity is seen as an expression of natural diversity.
Technology, even the most ecologically disruptive products and processes, are still regarded as ‘natural’ from this point of view. Yet, such unsustainable designs fail to participate appropriately in natural processes. To think of a nuclear reactor or a coal-fired power-plant, for example, as something separate from the ecosystems in which they are located is purely theoretical, since natural flows of matter and energy fundamentally connect these designs to the temporally and spatially scale -linking natural processes in which they participate.
In nature, any form or any design that does not adapt appropriately and effectively to these natural processes does not endure over time as an expression of natural process; and neither will inappropriate technologies or inappropriately participating societies or civilizations.
In essence, the process of learning from nature how to participate appropriately in natural process is what sustainability is all about. This learning never stops, since the only constant in
The Natural Design Movement 310 nature is change. Even the sustainable technologies of tomorrow will eventually have to re- adapt to this natural process of continuous and intermittent change.
To learn from nature how to adapt to natural process is an ability human beings share – to a greater or lesser extent - with all other species. The sheer fact of being alive today - existence in itself - can be regarded as convincing circumstantial evidence that this process of learning has been more or less successful so far.
Since the dawn of humanity our designs have been inspired by nature and adapted to natural processes. As a consequence of Descartes’ conceptual separation of humanity and nature – the observer and the observed – the focus of human learning changed. Rather than learning from nature (as a process in which we participate), how to best adapt to the conditions of a particular environment, the scientific revolution set a new goal of learning about nature (as a collection of material resources) in order to increase our ability to predict, manipulate, and control natural process.
This change in the focus of human learning ushered in the Industrial Revolution, which in little over two centuries and most violently in the last fifty years has transformed the face of the Earth. Two hundred years of what still seems to some as humanity’s technological triumph over natural limits are but a blink of an eye within the time-scales at which evolutionary processes respond to inappropriate patterns of participation and eliminate them. So far the escapades of human folly and their effects have been buffered by the extraordinary dynamic resilience of ecosystems and the biosphere.
Clearly, many impressive technological inventions have increased human awareness of what we are capable of – for good and for worse. The challenge for the designers of today and the future is to return to a more humble and more responsible and cautious way of learning from nature. We have to ask ourselves ‘which of our technological achievements are appropriately adapted to natural process?’ and ‘how can we re-design the technological civilization we have created in order to sustain human and planetary health into the future?’ To do so we must once again learn from nature! In the words of Professor John Todd:
The infrastructures of the modern world must be fundamentally redesigned to alter the means by which the human family supports and sustains itself. The big question is: where will the design revolution come
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from?The answer will be found in Nature – the great living complexities that have evolved over the past three and one half billion plus years. This biological phenomenon, this experiment we call life, has through time, trial, error, adaptation and invention evolved into a living tapestry. It contains the clues, information, blueprints and maps available for us to emulate directly the design for the societies of the new millennium. The Earth’s ecologies are embedded with a set of instructions that we urgently need to decode and employ in the design of human systems. This vast collective intelligence, which evolved over eons, needs to be understood and utilized by human designers addressing all spheres of human society (Todd, 2000, p.1).
Chapter three describes how with growing awareness of the effects of inappropriate technologies and attitudes, a worldwide movement is emerging that is beginning to address the paramount issue of re-designing humanity’s participation in natural process. In fact, this entire thesis aims to document the internal consistency of such an approach of learning from nature how to meet human needs while adapting to the opportunities and limits posed by nature.
The design of ecological or sustainable products, architecture, communities, cities, industries, bioregions and national as well as global politics are all expressions of this re- emerging focus on learning from nature. I refer to this emergent property of human civilization in the 21st century as the natural design movement. In this subchapter I will take a closer look at how designers can and do learn from nature. In doing so I will introduce many of world’s most prominent members of the natural design movement.
In this context, John Todd, his wife Nancy Jack-Todd, and their long-term associate Bill
McLarney are both of historical and contemporary importance. When they founded the New
Alchemy Institute in 1969 they created a modern precedence for committed research into learning from nature how to meet human needs sustainably. The institute and the work they have engaged in ever since have acted as a ‘touchstone of transmutation’ – catalysing the continuing emergence of the natural design movement. Like many other members of this movement they are midwives of a sustainable human civilization.
One of the first publications by the New Alchemy Institute in the early 1970s was entitled A Modest Proposal and its lengthy subtitle read: “Humanity’s Future Is Threatened by a
Loss of Biological and Social Diversity. To Counter This, a New Biotechnology Is Proposed”
(Jack-Todd, 2005, p.70). In this historical context, biotechnology is not to be understood as genetically modified organisms for corporate profits, but as a biologically adaptive technologies
The Natural Design Movement 312 that meet true human needs through careful adaptations to the challenges and opportunities offered by a specific place.
The report highlighted the environmental and social deterioration caused by many industrial technologies and called for ecologically and socially appropriate technologies that integrate into natural process benignly or beneficially. Recently, Nancy Jack-Todd described the early vision of ecologically designed technologies voiced in this historical document.
John … wrote of the imperative “to create biologically based technologies based upon an ecological ethic. It would function,” he explained, “at the lowest levels of society, providing inexpensive life-support bases for individual families, small farmers, or communities who desire more independence and a way of life that restores rather than destroys this fragile planet. It would be founded on the philosophical view that all things are interconnected and interdependent, and that the whole cannot be defined in monetary terms. Energy production, agriculture, landscapes, and communities must be tied together within individual research programmes and each area should be considered as a unique entity worthy of study. From indigenous research projects would evolve a biotechnology that reflects the needs of each region and peoples. In this way it will be possible to have fantastically varied communities and landscapes, as each develops its own integration with the world around it.” (Jack-Todd, 2005, p.70).
John and Nancy Todd defined ecological design as “design for human settlements and infrastructures that incorporates principles inherent in the natural world in order to sustain human populations over a long span of time; adapting the wisdom and strategies of the natural world to human populations” (Jack-Todd, 2005, p.161). During a course on Ecological Design at Schumacher College, in 2004, John Todd proposed that such an ecologically informed approach to design will result in “elegant solutions predicated on the uniqueness of place.”
Nancy-Jack Todd recently summarized the lasting effect of their work at the New Alchemy
Institute as follows:
What was most important about New Alchemy, and will remain so, was that it was the birthplace and incubator for ideas that are the building blocks for sustainable and lasting cultures. We had, in our experiments of applied Gaia, decoded some of the elements for healing both people and planet and had helped to give the world what Gregory Bateson had called a “paradigm of the future.” The seeds and the thought forms that we planted and so carefully tended at New Alchemy continue to spread and take root (Jack-Todd, 2005, p.142).
New Alchemy closed in the early 1990s and some of its material designs may have been superseded, but the “thought forms” and meta-design developed at New Alchemy have revealed the ‘Book of Nature’ herself as the tabula smaragdina of sustainable design, and have identified
The Natural Design Movement 313 appropriate participation in natural process as the elixir of life that can offer long-term sustainability to human communities and societies.
To anybody who truly commits to a path of learning from nature, and who is willing to reconsider basic assumption, New Alchemy has the potential of turning an isolated existence as a mortal and competitive individual fighting for survival in a meaningless world of dead matter and material resources into the sensuous rapture of conscious and co-creative participation in life’s continuous exploration of novelty in a sacred and conscious universe.
Natural wisdom is light years ahead of us in experience, systems and structures; three billion years of experience as compared to technology, still in its infancy, makes this inevitable. Even the humblest of nature’s designs would offer us conditions more suitable to human satisfaction. Ancient art was inspired by natural design, although this tendency has gradually and little by little been lost, let us use the handbook that has not been, and never will be, out of date: the Book of Nature (Sanosiain, 2003, p.2).
Mary Catherine Bateson highlights that historically “all human patterns of adaptation are designed not so much by individuals as by communities that refine and adapt their patterns over long periods of time.” Since “we are coming out of a period when the subtext of design was design against nature, design was creating environments that were different from nature” we will now have to, relatively quickly, re-design our patterns of participation in accordance with the patterns of natural systems (Bateson, 1997, p84).
When we think about design, we tend to think about material things: machines, automobiles, houses, highway systems. But you can apply the concept of design to social arrangements, social institutions, educational systems. We are going to have to design new patterns at all those levels, and they have to fit together. Our machines, our value systems, our educational systems will all have to be informed by this switch, from the machine age when we tried to design schools to be factories, to an ecological age, when we want to design schools, and families, and social institutions in terms of maintaining the quality of life not just for our species, but for the whole planet … We have to make a shift in our understanding of natural systems … The more we understand the integration of the natural world the more we’re able to look around us an feel rich. (Bateson, 1997, pp.84-85).
The salutogenic and integral design approach that is emerging with the natural design movement is beginning to provide practical design solutions in answer to these complex challenges. It does so by learning from nature. Chris Zelov and Phil Cousineau documented this emerging movement in their award winning film Ecological Design: Inventing the Future, and the film’s companion book, entitled Design Outlaws on the Ecological Frontier (Zelov &
Cousineau, 1997). Some statements from it are summarized in the box below (see box 3.4).
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Box 3.4: Some Voices of the Emerging Natural/Ecological Design Movement (Based on quotations from Zelov & Cousineau edits., 1997)
So what I see happening in the twenty-first century is that the concept of life, harmony in the environment, and a community as a living structure, I believe, will mature to the point where we can all have intelligent discussions about it, not to be afraid that it is all personal, that it’s just opinion, your opinion, that person’s opinion – that actually we can gradually attempt to reach consensus about what a living structure is and work our way toward it. Christopher Alexander (p.216)
In order to bring about a change in values one has to re-think what one values highly, and what one values not so highly. Then there can be a reorientation of our values that will earn expression in a reconstituted technology. We’re now expressing ourselves through our military technology, but we can also express ourselves through our environmental technology. Thomas Hughes (p.18)
That was a kind of allusion on his [Buckminster Fuller’s] part to the fact that we were in a sense, always trying to rediscover the Rosetta stone in nature and the basic principle. He was a bit like D’Arcy Thompson and the idea in On Growth and Form, that if you observe nature exquisitely and intimately, and with great sensitivity, you will be taught everything you need to know, because it is all basically there. Brendan O’Reagan (p.28)
A true designer, even though he or she is asked to work with a tiny spot of the earth, sees it as part of the total system and sees it as part of all history. By working to make it alive and vital, he or she contributes to the strengthening of the larger environment. Ed Bacon (p.64)
So we have a strange new problem, which is actually an ancient problem: How do we work efficiently and effectively in a place without destroying it in the very process of living there? William McDonough (p.86)
The problem of the specialist versus the generalist is really at the heart of this, and I keep saying we need generalists, we need people that think about the whole system. You don’t optimise one small piece, you optimise the interactions of all the pieces. There are economic dimensions, environmental dimensions, and social dimensions to all design problems. Peter Calthorpe (pp.111-112)
Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of nature for his reasonable use. William Morris (1834-1896) (p.121)
Once we’re understanding those worlds within worlds within worlds then we understand that what we’re doing affects everything. That understanding has got to be brought into everyday life and into design methodology. Pliny Fisk (p.148)
Culture is the way human beings have learned, through history, to survive, raise families and understand their own natures, as well as the nature of that which surrounds them. Harold Cohen (p.158)
A community can be made aware of what is happening to it and what the consequences are, and can propose solutions and see instant changes that these solutions would bring about. Then the community becomes a designer … Carol Franklin & Leslie Sauer p.204)
I believe that homemaking is something that everyone, man and woman, all human beings, could do on this planet. Making it an environment where growth is possible, not interfering with other forms of life, restoring – all this would come under the heading of ecopoeisis. Making this earth increasingly our home. The organism that destroys its environment destroys itself. Mary Cathrine Bateson (p.228)
For design to express profound truths and effect social change in the 21st century, it must speak in a dialect the locals will understand. John Connell (p.349)
Ecological designs are those compositions or constructions that reveal to others something about nature – the way the world works. Anthony Walmsley (p.355)
If I had my way, ecological design would become central to the curriculum at every single level of education: kindergarden, lower school, upper school, college, and university. Ian L. McHarg (p.373)
Human beings are going to be partners with other life forms. John Todd (p.172)
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In his insightful book Biologic – Designing with Nature to Protect the Environment, David
Wann speaks of “biologic” as a strategic tool for the creation of “benign design.” He defines biologic as “applied ecology,” and argues that “there’s no way we can design things correctly without understanding the fundamental dynamics of natural systems” (Wann, 1994, p.9).
Based on work by Wendell Berry, “the fundamental rules of the design game of biologic pivot around three basic questions: ‘What is here? What will nature permit us to do here? What will nature help us to do here?’” (Wann, 1994, p.10). Drawing on the wisdom of the eminent ecologist E. P. Odum, David Wann contrasts the way immature and mature ecosystems manifest their self-organization (see Table 3.1). It may be worth considering whether similar patterns should be adopted in the creation of a mature and sustainable human civilization.
Table 3.1: Comparison of Immature and Mature Ecosystems (After E.P. Odum, reproduced from Wann, 1994, p.10)
Immature Systems Mature Systems · Inefficient nutrient utilization (wasteful) · Highly efficient nutrient utilization · Competitive, cut-throat · Cooperative, mutualistic · Poor resistance to outside stress · Resilient, “Unsinkable” · Low information quality · High information quality · Food chains mostly linear, grazing · Food chains web-like, use all available wastes · Nutrients “extrabiotic” · Nutrients “intrabiotic” · Low species diversity · High species diversity · Niche generalists · Niche specialists · Short, simple life cycles · Long, complex life cycles · Fast nutrient turnover rate between organisms and · Slow nutrient turnover rate between organisms and environment environment · Production emphasis: quantity · Production emphasis: quality
Taking this comparison as a rough analogy for the differences between an immature and unsustainable culture and a mature and sustainable culture can provide an extremely informative basis for a trans-disciplinary design dialogue aimed at designing adaptive solutions for the sustainability transition. In Wann’s words: “Biologic requires that we follow the leader, and the leader is nature itself.” He emphasizes that “natural systems invariably move toward the principle of least effort” (Wann, 1994, p.144).
The book of nature is full of the design wisdom of 3.8 billion years of trial and error tested designs. Humanity can learn how to survive and find least effort solutions that allow for an improved quality of life by paying attention to natural processes and other species.
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The strong card of our species is the ability to intentionally design symbiosis into our social ecosystem. As in nature, it’s a trial-and-error proposition, and as everyone knows, experiments don’t always work. Species (both natural and cultural) often become extinct because they are unable to fit in. Even huge dinosaur technologies such as nuclear energy are not exempt. We have a clear incentive to strive for a better-designed world: either we learn to go with the flow, or we don’t go (Wann, 1994, p201).
Both at the macro-level of ecosystem self-organization and nutrient and energy flows, and at the micro-level of the ingenuity employed by individual species to solve a particular challenge, once we start to turn to nature for advice the potential of creating biologic, ecological, or natural design solution is literally without limits.
In a delightfully illustrated and detailed book, entitled Wild Solutions – How
Biodiversity is Money in the Bank, Andrew Beattie and Paul Ehrlich provide numerous examples of nature’s design ingenuity. They discuss how the planet’s biodiversity is involved in providing crucial ecosystem’s services like clean air and water, soil fertility, waste transformation and biological pest-control. Throughout the book, diverse examples from the biologist’s and ecologist’s treasure trove illustrate the enormous potential of designing innovative, benign and effective new products and services based on nature’s wisdom (Beattie
& Ehrlich, 2001). Beattie and Ehrlich emphasize:
The exploration of biological diversity leads to discoveries that make our way of life more sustainable; that is, they allow us to lead full and productive lives without jeopardizing the resources and the environments that our children, and our children’s children, will need. We are then better able to understand our role in the natural world and know how to avoid the big mistakes such as pollution and soil loss. Biological diversity keeps us alive and, beyond that, is the key to a dazzling variety of economic opportunities – many based on obscure tiny, and often very strange creatures. It is vital that species do not go extinct: there is no way of knowing which will turn out to be important [- all are!] (Beattie & Ehrlich, 2001, p.6).
One of the central insights of the natural design movement is humanity’s fundamental dependence on ecosystems services. The planet’s life support system provides the basis for all expressions of human culture. Once we learn to appreciate that ecosystems services are more productive and more important than any human industry or economy could ever be, we can put the prospect of learning from nature into its appropriate perspective: Nature is a profound source for sustainable design solutions. Humanity should become her humble and cautions
The Natural Design Movement 317 apprentice and follow her design examples in order to integrate appropriately into the life sustaining processes of the biosphere. Horst Brunckhorst explains:
The identities and lives of the seemingly infinite varieties of plants, animals, fungi and other organisms that make up the earth’s biological diversity are intrinsically intertwined. Those interactions in turn give rise to other fundamental properties that provide substantial ecological services, such as detoxification, nutrient assimilation, clean air and water (Daily, 1997). While occurring across a variety of scales, these functional attributes, of which human activity is a part, collectively make up what ecologists call our biosphere. The biosphere is the veneer of life, and its support on earth and in the atmosphere (Brunckhorst, 2002, p.13)
Gretchen Daily (2000) defines the concept of ecosystem services as “the conditions and processes through which natural ecosystems, and the species that are part of them, sustain and fulfil human life.” She emphasizes that so far “no one knows exactly how many species, nor which combinations, would be required to support human life” and suggests, rather than defining a list of species, it may be more useful to first consider the “life-support services required for survival” (Daily, 2000, p.230). Daily lists a number of crucial ecosystem services that are key contributors to the health of the biosphere and to the maintenance of the life- supporting processes of nature. These services are summarized in the box below (see Box 3.5).
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Box 3.5: Some Important Ecosystems’ Services (Adapted after Daily, 2000, pp.230-231)
· Production of a wide variety of ecosystem goods such as seafood, timber, forage, and many
pharmaceuticals
· Purification of air and water
· Protection against natural disasters such as flood and drought
· Detoxification and decomposition of wastes and cycling of nutrients.
· Generation and preservation of soils and renewal of their fertility
· Pollination of crops and natural vegetation
· Dispersal of seeds
· Control of the vast majority of agricultural pests
· Maintenance of biodiversity
· Protection from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays
· Partial stabilization of climate
· Provision of aesthetic beauty and intellectual stimulation
· … there are many more!
Sustainable design should add to – or at the very least maintain – the ability of ecosystems to provide those vital services for human and other life on Earth. The promise of the natural design movement is that it will do so most effectively and efficiently if our human designs are based on lessons we have learned from nature.
In an article entitled ‘What from Ecology is Relevant to Design and Planning?’,
Professor James Karr proposed: “The failure to understand or to work within the economy of nature spawned the environmental challenges we face today” (Karr, 2002, p.133). He argues:
Infusing the design and planning disciplines with ecological thinking is crucial because designers and planners, as disciplinary generalists and integrators, work at the interface of many disciplines. From the design of buildings to growth management and landscape design, ecological considerations impose constraints. But they also offer inspiration. The efficiency of ecological systems is unparalleled. Recycling is standard in those closed systems; waste does not occur. Air and water are not fouled in ways that cause biological collapse (Karr, 2002, pp.133-134).
Karr (2002) reviews a number of important concepts from biology and ecology and relates them to a more appropriate and ecologically adapted practice of design. He emphasizes: “Although natural systems are never in equilibrium, organisms have evolved to survive and reproduce in a
The Natural Design Movement 319 narrow range of physical and chemical environments (that is, in a dynamic but bounded equilibrium). Pushing systems beyond those limits may result in species extinction and even system collapse (complete system breakdown).” Karr warns: “Although natural systems can withstand diverse natural disturbances within the range of their evolutionary experience, human-induced disturbances that are beyond that experience in type, magnitude, or frequency may radically shift system configuration” (Karr, 2002, p.150). Karr explains, in general ecological terms, what is one of the most common human design mistakes and a blatant disregard of one of nature’s most fundamental evolutionary tendencies:
Human actions are often directed toward simplifying systems as we strive to concentrate production in those parts and processes we value most. Simplification often produces unexpected consequences. The resultant loss of complexity and diversity may threaten critical processes that provide utilitarian or functional value to humans. Loss of natural system integrity is the all-to-common result. Some divergence from integrity may be culturally acceptable, even necessary, in some areas dedicated to support the needs of humans. Care is necessary to maintain the condition of health of such areas to ensure that their use by human society does not alter their ability to provide the needs of both human and nonhuman living systems over the long term (sustainability) (Karr, 2002, p.150).
Professors Bart Johnson and Kristina Hill (2002) believe “that design excellence must be judged by both aesthetic and ecological criteria;” and argue that it is “ethically unacceptable for our students and for practitioners in the design fields to decide to concern themselves with art but not ecology” (Johnson & Hill, 2002, p.7). They suggest: “One important arena for building common ground in design and ecology … would be developing an understanding of health that integrates ecological health and human health” (Johnson & Hill, 2002, p.12) (see chapter two).
Scope not permitting further exploration, I would like to refer the reader to an excellent compendium edited by Johnson and Hill (2002) under the title Ecology and Design –
Frameworks for Learning. No doubt, it will prove a valuable resource to the natural design movement.
There are various different terminologies to describe ‘learning from nature’ within the emerging natural design movement. These range from biological and ecological design, to biomimicry, biomimetics and bionics, to bio-cybernetic design, or simply natural design. The words biomimetics and biomimicry are derived from the Greek words for life (bios) and imitation (mimesis); the word bionics is a combination of the word for life and technology.
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In a biomimetic world, we would manufacture the way animals and plants do, using sun and simple compounds to produce totally biodegradable fibres, ceramics, plastics, and chemicals. Our farms modelled on the prairies, would be self-fertilizing and pest-resistant. To find new drugs and crops, we would consult animals and insects that have used plants for millions of years to keep themselves healthy and nourished. Even computing would take its cue from nature, with software that “evolves” solutions (Benyus, 2002, p.1- 2).
The biologist and design consultant Janine Benyus has described biomimicry as “a conscious emulation of life’s genius” (Benyus, 2002, p.2). She has provided a thorough survey of the various attempts in diverse disciplines to learn from nature and apply the insights to the design of artifacts and processes.
Benyus demonstrates convincingly how important a role natural process can play in providing insights in the creation of sustainable design solutions. She emphasizes “the only way to keep learning from nature is to safeguard naturalness, the wellspring of good ideas” and argues that “at this point in history, we contemplate the very real possibility of losing a quarter of all species in the next thirty years, biomimicry becomes more than just a new way of looking at nature. It becomes a race and a rescue” (Benyus, 2002, p.9).
Design based on biomimicry relies on insights from biology, chemistry, physics, ecology and many other disciplines. Transdisciplinary teams that apply the wisdom of many minds and viewpoints are the creators of biomimetic design solutions that integrate effectively into natural process. This dialogue based learning about nature’s wisdom and applying it to creative problem solving requires a new attitude towards the study of nature, informed by the holistic sciences (see chapter one).
It is in such trans-disciplinary design teams that the value of the important insights provided by reductionistic specialists will be appreciated in the context of a more ecological and holistic perspective. Again, we encounter the underlying shift in intention from control, prediction and manipulation to appropriate participation in natural process. Benyus suggests that there are three ways in which biomimicry learns from nature. These are listed and described in the box below (see box 3.6).
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Box 3.6: The Biomimicry Approach to Learning From Nature (After Benyus, 2002, ii)
Nature as model Biomimicry is a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems, e.g. a solar cell inspired by a leaf.
Nature as measure Biomimicry uses an ecological standard to judge the “rightness” of our innovations. After 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has learned: What works? What is appropriate? What lasts?
Nature as mentor Biomimicry is a new way of viewing and valuing nature. It introduces an era based not on what we can extract from the natural world, but on what we can learn from it.
Benyus writes: “This time, we come not to learn about nature so that we might circumvent or control her, but to learn from nature, so that we might fit in, at last and for good, on the earth from which we sprang (Benyus, 2002, p.9). This clearly reiterates the intention common to all representatives of the natural design movement: appropriate participation in natural process as the methodology of sustainability.
Through the diverse studies of natural systems performed by ecologists all over the world, we are now able to look at their results in an attempt to synthesize out certain “hidden likenesses among many interwoven systems.” Benyus proposes that slowly a cannon of nature’s laws, strategies and principles is emerging. The box below contains such a list of nature’s design principles (see Box 3.7).
Box 3.7: Nature’s Design Principles (Adapted from Benyus, 2002, p.7)
· Nature runs on sunlight
· Nature uses only the energy it needs
· Nature fits form to function
· Nature recycles everything
· Nature rewards cooperation
· Nature banks on diversity
· Nature demands local expertise and adaptation
· Nature curbs excesses from within
· Nature taps the power of limits
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“The practice of biomimicry requires community, not just with other organisms, but with people in other disciplines,” writes Janine Benyus. She beliefs that many sustainable design solutions can be created through the collaboration between experts in biology and engineering and argues that “we need to bring together fields of study that have been kept separate”(Benyus, 2005, p.22). This reiterates the necessity for integrating multiple perspectives in the creation of truly sustainable communities and societies.
Design connects culture and nature through flows of energy and matter. … If we take ecology as the basis for designing our products, buildings, and communities, we can preserve natural capital while meeting human needs. … A new vision of ecological design is emerging, one that brings together architects, planners, engineers, farmers, artists, and many others in a shared search for the nitty-gritty design details of a sustainable culture (Cowan, 1997, p.135).
In Lessons from Nature – Learning to Live Sustainably on the Earth, Daniel Chiras, a biologist by training and author of various textbooks on environmental science and on sustainability, proposes a number of “operating principles for a sustainable society.” These are effective guidelines for appropriate participation in natural process, which were arrived at through observing, participating in, and understanding natural process itself. The box below summarizes five main reasons why ecosystems manage to self-regulate and self-sustain themselves (see Box 3.8). These can be understood as nature’s operating principles for a sustainable society.
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Box 3.8: Lessons from Nature: Operating Principles of a Sustainable Society (Reproduced, summarized and adapted from Chiras, 1992, pp.31-35)
CONSERVATION (EFFICIENCE) Nature’s first lesson is conservation, the efficient use of resources. The antithesis of conservation is waste. In nature, wirtually nothing is wasted. For the most part, species use what they need. No more, no less. Mature ecosystems persist in part because they do not waste. Although many despair about the enormous waste of modern society, there is hope. Where there is waste, there’s opportunity for vast improvement. By closing the loops, becoming more conscientious consumers, and using energy and other resources more efficiently, we can move toward a sustainable state.
RECYCLING Nature’s second strategy is recycling. In nature, everything is used over and over again. New generations are built from the old. Nutrients from soil, water, and air support plants. Plants feed herbivores. Herbivores are eaten by carnivores. The death and decay of these organisms return nutrients to the air, soil, and water, permitting the cycle of life to repeat itself ad infinitum. Recycling not only eliminates waste but helps to guarantee sustainability. Human success, indeed our survival, depends on following a similar path.
RENEWABLE RESOURCES Nature’s third lesson is the use of renewable resources. In the long run, human success depends on shifting more and more to renewable resources, as many as possible and as quickly. Renewable resources are no panacea, however, for improperly managed timber cutting, farming, and ranching can result in severe erosion and marked decrease in the productivity of the land. A sustainable society, therefore, depends not just on shifting to renewable resources but on the careful management of the Earth’s regenerative gifts.
POPULATION CONTROL The fourth lesson of nature is population control. Through sometimes simple, and other times elaborate, systems nature controls its numbers. Whatever the mechanism, population control in ecosystems helps to ensure their preservation. We cannot let humanity be destroyed by a doctrine of individual freedom or by religious beliefs conceived in isolation from the biological facts of life. Despite recognizing that unlimited population growth is the seed of our ruination, control efforts remain insufficient.
RESTORATION Self-healing is nature’s fifth strategy. The ability of the human body to survive the many assaults it endures depends on innate mechanisms of repair. Nature also possesses a remarkable self-healing ability, which contributes significantly to sustainability. Unfortunately, in the relentless quest for material wealth humans hace frequently altered conditions of ecosystems so drastically that that natural restoration cannot occur. If humans are going to create a sustainable presence on the planet, we must restore ecosystems that have been grossly damaged over the course of human civilization. In all future resource extraction, restoration must be a primary objective.
The operating principles for a sustainable society, proposed by Chiras, correspond to the survival strategies of organisms in mature ecosystems listed by Janine Benyus. She explains:
“over billions of years, natural selection has come up with winning strategies adopted by all complex, mature ecosystems;” and suggests a series of “tried-and-true approaches to the mystery of surviving in place” (Benyus, 2002). These are summarized in the box below (see
Box 3.9).
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Box 3.9: Nature’s Design Strategies (Based on Benyus, 2002, pp.253-284)
1. Waste as a Resource A mature community becomes more and more self-contained. Rather than exchanging nutrients and minerals with the outside environment at a high rate, it circulates what it needs within …All waste is food and everybody winds up reincarnated inside somebody else … the only import is sunlight … the only export is the by-product of its energy use, heat. 2. Diversify and Cooperate to Fully use the Habitat In mature ecosystems, cooperation seems to be just as important as competition. Using cooperative strategies, organisms spread out into noncompeting niches and basically clean up every crumb before it falls on the table. This diversity of niches creates a dynamic stability; if one organism drops out of the network, there’s usually a backup, allowing the web to stay whole. 3. Gather and Use Energy Efficiently Even in a natural system, only nutrients and minerals can be circulated through diverse connections of an ecosystem; energy cannot.. … Biological catalysts also allow nature to manufacture benignly; instead of using high heats and harsh chemicals to create or break bonds, nature manufactures at room temperature and in water…We can learn a lot from plants. Ideally, we too should use an external, renewable source of energy, specifically current sunlight Natural systems use their energy to maximize diversity so they can be more efficient in terms of mineral and nutrient recycling. 4. Optimise Rather Than Maximize The mature system keeps the bulk of its materials and nutrients ‘on the stump’, instead of passing nutrients through to decay each year, most of the biomass stays put. …The lesson is to slow down the throughput of materials, emphasizing the quality rather than the quantity of new things … shift the emphasis from manufacturing a new model every year to manufacturing longer lived designs and creating subsidiary companies devoted to remanufacturing and upgrading. 5. Use Materials Sparingly Organisms build for durability, but they don’t overbuild. … Organisms have also evolved to make the most of every design decision, by having one structure serve not just one but two or three functions … constant adapting and reassessing of material use … dematerialization … creating synergy between two types of materials – a composite – is another way to gain strength without adding bulk. 6. Don’t Foul Their Nest Organisms build their bodies using catalysts and self-assembly techniques, riding the free roller coaster of physics to put together adaptive materials. Moderation in energy and material use is the order of the day. By not stressing the supply lines or cleanup mechanisms in their environment, organisms win the right to keep on making a living. … Decentralization of production facilities … The smaller the production load and the shorter the ‘commute’, the less likely is it that large , nest-fouling fluxes or massive breakdowns will occur 7. Don’t Draw Down Resources Organisms in mature ecosystems live on harvestable interest, not principal. The best predator, for instance, is the one that doesn’t completely eliminate its prey … Don’t use non-renewable resources faster than you can develop substitutes. … Don’t use renewable resources faster than they can regenerate. 8. Remain in Balance with the Biosphere Whatever is removed from the resource reservoirs, through processes of photosynthesising, respiring, growing, mineralising, and decaying, is replaced in equal amounts. Through the revolving door of organisms, the stocks circulate but they don’t run down. … gases in the atmosphere are also held in a delicate but dynamic balance. 9. Run on Information Mature communities, like innovative and productive companies, have rich communication channels that carry feedback to all members, influencing their march toward sustainability … What makes a mature community run is not one universal message being broadcast from above, but numerous, even redundant, messages coming from the grass roots, dispersed through the community structure. A rich feedback system allows changes in one component of the community to reverberate through the whole, allowing for adaptation when the environment changes.
10. Shop Locally Because animals can’t import products from Hong Kong, they shop locally and become local experts in their own backyards …If [the] bioregionalism movement achieves its full promise, economic boundaries will be redrawn in real terms, being more closely related to watersheds, soil types, and climate regimes than to the political boundaries we currently honour.
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In her extremely informative book Biomimicry – Innovation Inspired by Nature, Janine Benyus explores each of these ten natural design strategies in much more detail and offers a number of examples of their application in design, planning and industry. Her book also describes how researchers in a diverse range of disciplines from green chemistry, material science, marine biology, information technology, molecular computing, agriculture, medicine, botany, molecular biology, and of course ecology are engaged in a new type of learning from rather than about nature (see Benyus, 2002).
The study of biomimetics and researchers that ascribe to the label ‘bionics’ tend to have a more exclusively engineering and technologist mindset when they approach the subject of learning form nature. The aim to find more sustainable solutions may not always be the primary motivation for such researchers.
The field of bionics has been around since the 1960s when the term was coined by the
US Airforce major J.E. Steele to describe the approach of a multi-disciplinary conference aiming to learn more about the biological sonar of bats in order to improve the technical systems employed by the military. Some researchers today, identify it exclusively with the creation of artificial human body parts – bionic limbs, ears, and eyes (e.g. Rosaler, 2003). In the
English speaking world, the approach is more often referred to as biomimetics, as distinct from the biomimicry approach advocated by Benyus (2002), which is more holistic and process oriented than the structurally oriented field of biomimetics and bionics.
In Germany, the field of ‘bionics’ has for along time been promoted by the director of the Zoological Institute of the University of the “Saarland”, Professor Werner Nachtigal. For decades he has published books on bionics and taught technical zoology and the physiology of movement to his students and to engineers in industry. Particularly over the last ten years, bionics has become a booming field of interdisciplinary collaboration between various biological and physical sciences and applied engineering.
Nachtigall defines bionics as “learning from nature as an inspiration of independent, technical design” (transl. Nachtigall, 1997, p.1). He explains: “Bionics as a scientific discipline focuses systematically on the technical realization and application of construction process and development principles of biological systems” (Nachtigall, 1997, p.2). For him, “to engage in
The Natural Design Movement 326 technical biology is to explore and describe nature from the point of view and the methodological processes of technical physics and related fields” (Nachtigall, 1997, p.3).
Professor Nachtigall proposes that there are ten basic principles of bionic design which are summarized in the box below (see Box 3.10).
Box 3.10: Principles of Bionic Design (Summarized and translated from Nachtigall, 1997, pp.21-34)
1. Integrated instead of additive construction The individual elements of a natural construction are usually multi-functional. Elements blend into each other so they cannot be easily distinguished as separate parts. There are non-linear changes in elasticity are just as common as gradual transitions.
2. Optimisation of the whole, rather than maximisation of individual elements Biological constructions rigorously avoid maximisation – which would frequently imply an impairment of other elements. Rather, the optimisation of the whole system tends to be the primary evolutionary directive.
3. Multifunctionality instead of monofunctionality In biological construction, individual elements tend to perform various, often complementary, functions. Some tasks are performed based on networks of cooperating individual elements.
4. Fine tuning adapted to particular environments The diverse interactions between one life form and its animate and inanimate environment requires diverse adaptations, which are often expressed in intricate morphological details. The details are best understood once the type of adaptation is identified.
5. Energy saving instead of energy squandering Since there is only a limited amount of energy available to every organism, they choose carefully how to spend it. Energy saving at the level of the whole system has priority, which implies energy saving in all individual processes.
6. Direct and indirect use of solar energy Energy conservation is achieved by using solar energy directly or indirectly wherever possible; e.g. passive solar gain, solar heat driven ventilation, photosynthesis.
7. Temporal limitation instead of unnecessary durability Nature does not create durability if there is no purpose for it, many natural structures are more ephemeral and are renewed when needed.
8. Total recycling instead of waste accumulation This is one of the most important principles of the living world. Nature knows no waste! At the end of its lifespan the temporally limited materials of the organism simply disintegrate (often aided by physical factors like temperature, UV radiation, or biological factors like fungi or bacteria).
9. Networks instead of linearity In nature everything is networked and interwoven with everything else. Thus, don’t be fearful of extreme complexity, even if it is incomprehensible to linear reasoning. Nature often works probabilistically, applying the enormous potential of self- organisation. This leads to relatively stable systems. 10. Development through the process of trial and error In contrast to planning engineers evolution tends not to construct in goal directed manner. Diverse and often minute variations over a basic theme produce variability, which offers selective advantages to some variants when the environmental conditions change.
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Werner Nachtigall (1997) offers very detailed descriptions and illustrations of biological examples for each of these principles of bionic design. While the technical rigour of the bionic approach tends to pre-dispose it to a very rational and mechanistic mind-set, which introduces its own limitations, it would nevertheless be advisable to include bionic specialists into an effective and comprehensive design team.
The lessons form nature to engineers involved in creating bionic technologies have been very diverse. Among the fields where significant improvements of technical designs have been made possible by taking a closer look at nature’s design strategies are: aero- and fluid- dynamical optimisation, echolocation and sonar, light-weight construction, ventilation, packaging, adhesion, propulsion, pumping, locomotion, material composites, volume optimisation, and many more (see Nachtigal, 1997, pp.64).
At a conference in 2004 at the University of Applied Science in Bremen, the first institution to offer a BSc in Bionics, I observed that the field is certainly dynamic and growing, but limits itself by an almost dogmatic effort to distance itself from ecological/sustainability concerns as its primary motivator. Among the diverse presentations during the 2004 conference of the German ‘Society for Technical Biology and Bionics’ and the ‘Bionics Competency
Network’ there were research reports on: self-repairing materials in nature, self-sharpening tools based on rodent teeth, tensile water technologies in trees, the innovation potential of biological surfaces, anti-fouling surfaces, suction adhesion based on water bugs, novel applications for biological hair-cell sensors, movement bionics, osmotic regulation and micro fluid dynamics, bionic robots, mother of pearl and composite ceramics, and the construction principles of hornet nests (University of Applied Science Bremen, 2004).
I am unable to explore the fascinating field of bionics any further within the scope of this thesis. Germany is clearly taking a leading role in this new technological discipline inspired by examples and lessons from nature (see for example, Nachtigall, 1997; Nachtigal &
Blüchel, 2000; Rossman & Tropea, 2004, Kesel, 2005).
The subject of organic architecture is another field of nature inspired design which I will omit almost completely. Like bionics, improving the sustainability of a building does not always primarily motivate organic architecture. Inspiration tends to be more based on
The Natural Design Movement 328 morphological analogies and a static rather than process oriented approach (see e.g.: Llimargas,
2001; Fornés et al. 2003; Aldersey-Williams, 2003; Hersey, 1999; Van der Ree, 2001;
Senosiain, 2003; Tischhauser, 2001; Buchanan, 1995).
Nor will I enter into descriptions of the biological principles of form and development, omitting discussions of the Fibonacci series and the golden mean, self-organization, and the fractal geometry of nature (see e.g. Wade, 1991; Schneider, 1995; Ball, 1999; Mandelbrot,
1977; Goodwin, 1994). These are all relevant and informative subjects, that provide a more comprehensive knowledge base for designers inspired by natures example, but since the main focus here is ‘design for human and planetary health’ and sustainability, I have chosen to delay a more detailed exploration of these subjects to a later date and publication.
‘Learning from nature’ is such a complex subject with many different aspects that should be explored further, but the broadly integrative nature of this thesis prevents me from exploring the subject in much more detail at this point. To a certain extent, the entire thesis is based on the insight that nature has to be both our teacher and measure, in any attempt to create design that appropriately participates in natural process.
The complexity of interactions and relationships in a fundamentally interconnected and unpredictable world, are presenting us with the challenge of creating designs that integrate appropriately into this complexity. We have to become humble and cautious co-designers of complex dynamic systems and there is much to learn from nature’s own design experience honed by 3.8 billion years of the trial and error of evolution. Sustainable design is ultimately about making sure that humanity does not rapidly become one of the errors of evolution
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3.5) Co-Designing Complex Systems
Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher. William Wordsworth 1770-1850 (in Schneider, 1995, p.xxxii)
Both human societies and the ecosystems they inhabit can be studied as complex dynamic systems in their own right. In doing so we have to be aware that we have introduced a high level of theoretical abstraction into our approach since ultimately culture and nature are fundamentally connected and constantly interacting.
Culture really is a natural epiphenomenon of the underlying natural process. Cultures evolve in co-dependence with their natural environment, no matter whether they regard themselves as separate from or expressions of natural process. The separation of nature and culture is never more than conceptual, but the Metadesign of conceptual separation can drastically influence our epistemology, our perception and thus how we experience reality.
In the perspective explored by this thesis, all cultural expressions are understood and re- evaluated within the context of the wider complex dynamic system, which contains them – nature, or natural processes. This perspective acknowledges that humans cannot but change the environment they inhabit, and simultaneously the conditions of the local environment will affect the kind of human cultural expressions that are possible in that particular ecosystem.
While nature contains culture, if I distinguish the two it is done in the understanding that nature and culture co-evolve through the complex dynamics of mutual interdependence. As such, cultural evolution can be regarded as a process in which human populations co-design their complex cultural expressions of and adaptations to natural process based on constant feedback between nature and culture. We are dealing with conscious participation in a complex dynamic system (and process).
Daniel Chiras makes an interesting distinction between high- and low-synergy societies.
He suggests that the Western “frontier” mentality that aims to increase power over nature has led to an increasing loss of synergy between cultural and natural processes. Chiras distinguishes the social and ecological dimension of synergy. Ecological synergy is best understood as a
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“measure of co-operation between humanity and nature” (Chiras, 1992, p.24). Social synergy, correspondingly, “is simply a measure of co-operation in a society.” Chiras proposes: “A low- synergy society like ours is characterized by bitter conflict over resources and often by inefficient use of these resources” (Chiras, 1992, p.25). He offers the following examples to describe and distinguish the differences between a high-synergy and a low-synergy society.
A low-synergy society, for example, grows crops at the expense of soil, birds, and beneficial insects. It destroys the habitat of fish and wildlife, endangering our own food supply. It builds homes and offices in floodplains. It replaces diverse ecosystems with monocultures that are often highly vulnerable to infestation and disease. In contrast, a high synergy society satisfies the needs of people without subtracting from nature’s capital. That is, it grows crops without depleting soils or poisoning wildlife and beneficial insects. It harvests trees while protecting the forest, without clogging nearby streams and lakes with sediment eroded from the land. It designs communities that exist in harmony with nature - not in floodplains. A high-synergy society does not merely prevent destruction from occurring, it seeks ways to enhance nature. That is, it reaps the benefits of the Earth but also promotes the long-term health and welfare of the ecosystem (Chiras, 1992, p.25).
Chiras points out that the complex food webs and nutrient cycling of mature and relatively undisturbed ecosystems can serve as a natural example of how to design for high synergy.
“Billions of years of evolution have created an elegant synergy in nature.” Yet as Chiras emphasises: “In a brief span of time … humans have begun to unravel the fabric of ecological synergy, replacing it with a system that is out of step with nature and torn by vigorous competition for limited resources.” He argues: “Creating sustainability means greatly increasing the levels of social and environmental synergy,” and proposes that this will be possible “only with a new value system that respects limits, offers a more equitable share to other species, recognizes our place in the natural order, and favours cooperation over domination” (Chiras, 1992, p.26). In the process of co-designing sustainable human societies within the sustainable limits of the ecosystems they inhabit, the focus should be on increasing synergy at and between all the scales of the complex natural process in which we participate.
In their informative book The Age of the Network – Organizing Principles of the 21st
Century, Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps highlight the importance of being aware that depending on whether we focus our design thinking on structures or processes, we will conceptualise based on hierarchies or based on the dynamic relationships between and within
The Natural Design Movement 331 these levels (holoarchies). They write: “Levels and complements: Where there are system structures, there are hierarchies of levels. Where there are systems processes, there are complementary relationships” (Lipnack & Stamps, 1994, p.229). This is an important distinction we should be aware of when we conceptualise and describe the co-design of complex dynamic systems.
Professor Frederic Vester has suggested that natural systems and their economy can best be understood based on a number of bio-cybernetic principles. According to Vester these principles help to explain how nature has managed to remain a self-regulating and self- propagating process over many millions of years. More and more complex life forms and more and more complex systems and subsystems of interaction and relationship have evolved during the course of the evolution of life. Nevertheless, the overall biomass on the planet seems to have been relatively constant over a very long period of time. It is estimated that there are about
2000,000,000 tons of biomass on Earth (Vester, 2004, p.118).
Despite an overall growth in biomass of near zero, nature transforms hundreds of billions of tons of oxygen and carbohydrates, as well as many billions of tons of heavy and light metals like iron, vanadium, cobalt, magnesium, sodium, potassium and calcium. This occurs mainly in an extensive way, but on occasion also intensively, at high density and in a very small space. As a rule, nature’s production systems are decentralized, usually into miniaturized production units that employ the subtlest technologies (Vester, 2004, p.118).
Professor Vester argued that a bio-cybernetic approach to sustainable design will take
Nature’s fundamental interconnectedness into account and will recognize that humanity and all the technologies we create are dependent on and part of nature. He saw a need to reconnect our technologies to this ground of their being and bring them in accordance with it. Living nature and not dead mater, which know no technology, brought forth all human artefacts. “Nature and technology are not two separate worlds as many people believe, Nature herself and our own organism employ sophisticated technologies” (transl. Vester, 2004, p.122).
According to Professor Vester humanity has so far relied on - often unconscious - imitation of natural structure and function, and was under the assumption that human technologies will not jeopardize the overall health of the whole system – the biosphere. While
The Natural Design Movement 332 we learned from nature’s function and structure, we omitted to pay enough attention to the dynamic interactions and relationships of nature as a complex dynamic system, which guide the way that nature employs technologies. Vester emphasizes: “to achieve an integration into the biosphere that is sustainable in the long term, we have to learn from nature how to create structure and function, as well as from her bio-cybernetic organizing principles and processes”
(transl. Vester, 2004, pp.122-123). Vester writes:
As a scientifically trained systems analyst and after intensive study of the cybernetic structures of the living world and its ingenious bionic organizing principles and processes, I dare to suggest that we are not at the end of an era of technical and economic innovation, but rather at its beginning. There is one condition: we have to learn to let go of the criteria of progress which we have employed as the measure of economic prosperity since the beginning of the industrial age (transl. Vester, 2004, p.123)
Frederick Vester has proposed eight fundamental rules of bio-cybernetic organization. He frequently emphasizes that in dealing with complex systems the most important goal is to maintain the overall life support system that allows the system to continue its own maintenance.
Vester was therefore clearly another proponent of a salutogenic design approach (see chapter two). He argues that in order to maintain a system’s ability to survive these eight rules have to be followed. Combined with a joined-up way of thinking, these would help humanity to at least avoid severe mistakes in our planning.
Professor Vester first proposed these bio-cybernetic design rules over 25 years ago, during a research project for the UNESCO. He stressed that they are not invented but that he learned them from Nature, and that they don’t tell you how not to behave, rather they are both guidelines for innovation and a challenge for appropriate system’s design. The box below summarizes these eight rules of bio-cybernetic organization of self-sustaining systems (see Box
3.11).
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Box 3.11: Eight Fundamental Bio-Cybernetic Design Rules for Complex Self-Sustaining Systems (Translated, summarized and adapted from Vester, 2004, pp.157-169)
1. There should be more negative feedback cycles than positive feedback cycles in the system. Positive feedback provides the initial dynamism in the system, but negative feedback loops help to maintain the dynamic stability that provides resistance against disturbance and after limits have been exceeded. Negative feedback is self-regulation through cyclical processes.
2. The overall functioning of the system has to be independent of quantitative growth. The throughput of energy and matter in self-sustaining systems is constant over the long-term. This reduces the potentially disastrous influence of irreversibility and uncontrolled excess beyond the limits of the system. If a system wants to grow and survive long-term at the same time, it will have to undergo a number of metamorphoses.
3. The system has to operate in a function (service) oriented way and not a product oriented way. A corresponding dynamic diversity increases the overall flexibility of the system and its ability to adapt. This way the system survives even if the conditions change. Products often change quickly, functions on the other hand are relevant for much longer. It is always the meeting of needs and therefore functions that is longer successful than a particular product.
4. Use the available forces following the principles of Jiu-Jitsu rather than Boxing. Making use of energy external to the system (energy cascades, energy chains), while using the systems own energy mainly to gently guide. Nature manages to make use of energy chains and energy cascades, like photosynthesis and catalysis. Through working with rather than against the existing structures and materials nature achieves an efficiency rating, which engineers would not even dare to dream about.
5. Make multiple use of products, functions, and organisational structures and processes. Multi-use reduces the overall throughput, increases the degree of interconnection, and reduces the energy, material and information requirements. To ensure multi-use of human products we will have to learn to think and act trans-disciplinarily in research, design and production.
6. Recycling: Use circular processes to make use of waste and waste-water. In self-sustaining systems the input and output melt into one. All material flows should be circular. This reduces irreversibility and dependence. In human systems, the highest potential for effective recycling is between different industries rather than within them.
7. Symbiosis. Mutually advantageous usage of diversity through interconnection and exchange. Symbiosis favours small processes and short transport distances. It reduces energy consumption, throughput and external dependencies, while increasing internal interdependence. In Nature symbiosis is not a rare occurrence, rather it is the basis of all living systems and is therefore found in a breathtaking diversity across all scales. Without symbiosis we would not exists.
8. Biological design of products, processes and organizations through the use of feed-back planning. A biological way of designing is sensitive to internally and externally generated rhythms, uses resonance and functional, adapted forms, harmonises the overall dynamic of the system and allows for the organic integration of new elements in accordance with these eight rules.
Vester has argued that we have to make every product, every function and every organization into a contribution to the ability of our species to survive, rather than continue to create things that impoverish us and may contribute to our un-timely extinction. We have to design things
The Natural Design Movement 334 that are compatible with human biology and with nature, these things have to correspond to the structure of self-sustaining, autopoietic processes or systems.
Vester emphasized that this is an ecological, psychological and economic demand. The adherence to biological designs should never isolate a planning and a realization stage, it should occur in constant feedback with the natural-processes in the local environment (Vester, 2004, p.170).
Co-design of complex systems is not a terminal but a continuous process. As nature – the containing system – is undergoing constant change, the adaptations we are designing in response to natural conditions will also have to be flexible enough that they can accommodate such changes over the short and the long-term.
According to Vester, the eight bio-cybernetic rules are applicable to all living systems, from a minute single cell to a regional ecosystem. The reason for this universal applicability is that all complex systems of nature are entangled parts of the same higher order and therefore share a common pattern, which repeats itself across all scales of magnitude.
Vester pointed out that this insight pre-dates its corroboration through chaos theory. He suggested these bio-cybernetic design rules are generally applicable to the entire ecosphere and therefore they also apply to the technosphere and all the systems created by humans: companies, communities, traffic and energy systems, as well as political and education systems (Vester,
2004, p.172).
Professor Vester believed that “cooperation with nature – rather than working against her – is always the more economically wise strategy, and in the long run it will always incur less financial cost” (trans. Vester, 2004, p.172). In his role as visiting professor of economics at the
Hochschule St. Gallen in Switzerland and as an international consultant, Frederic Vester has promoted the use of these eight bio-cybernetic design rules in many companies and institutions.
They were included in his report to the Club of Rome of which he has been a member since
1993.
Frederick Vester’s contributions to our understanding of the co-design of complex systems, the modelling soft-ware he developed and many of the practical design projects he was involved in will continue to inform the emerging natural design movement. Like Gregory
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Bateson and Donella Meadows, Frederick Vester has been a major contributor to raising awareness of our participatory, co-creative involvement in the complex systems dynamics of nature.
The integration of culture into the dynamics of ecosystems requires us to engage in the design of human ecosystems. The landscape architect and ecological design educator, John
Tillman Lyle proposed that in the design of human ecosystems we have to be particularly careful to mimic a number of characteristics that support the dynamic stability of the natural ecosystem to which our human designs have to adapt to and which we are, at the same time, adapting for human participation in it.
Lyle pointed out that this dynamic stability, which can also be understood as the health of the ecosystem, has two important elements to it: resistance and resilience. Resistance is about the ecosystems ability to resist damaging influences; and resilience is about the ecosystems ability to recover from a perturbation that did upset the material and energy flow as well as the internal relationship within the system. Lyle’s work is yet another example of the emerging salutogenic approach to design, so common among members of the natural design movement.
In order to design appropriate human ecosystems, we have to maintain the dynamic stability or health of the system. Lyle listed six characteristics of stable ecosystems on the work of the pioneering ecologist Eugene Odum. While they primarily refer to the dynamics of ecological systems, Lyle suggested that they can act as guiding principles for the design of human ecosystems in co-adaptation to natural processes (see Box 3.12).
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Box 3.12: Characteristics of Resilient and Resistant Ecosystems (Modified after Lyle, 1985, p.231)
Slow and Relatively Complete Internal Cycling Materials are reused within the system in closed loops. Comparatively small quantities are taken in from other systems or exported to them. This operation implies a high degree of local self-sufficiency. Materials are reused within the system in closed loops. Comparatively small quantities are taken in from other systems or exported to them. This operation implies a high degree of local self-sufficiency.
Varied Pathways of Flow Material and energy move in complex and diverse patterns, making it probable that if a flow is broken at some point by some unusual event, the overall movement continues through parallel, if not identical routes.
Filled Niches Each link in the chain is occupied by a species adapted to that particular role. Niches tend to be narrow in mature systems, and the species occupying them are comparatively specialized.
High Volume of Life (or Biomass) per Unit of Energy Energy is used sparingly and efficiently to support life.
Low Net Production Materials produced by the system are mostly used within the system. There is little accumulation and little export.
High Information Content This goes with complexity. While a significant part of information in natural systems is stored within its genetic diversity, the related diversity of species and variability within species and even more so the dynamic web of interactions and relationships between those species is the main store of information in ecosystems
The task of co-designing our human systems effectively in such a way that they integrate into the complex dynamics of ecosystems will require designers to pay close attention to these characteristic of healthy ecosystems.
The nine precepts of ecological or biological design suggested by John Todd and Nancy
Jack-Todd (1993) are another set of valuable guidelines in the creative co-design of culture and nature as an appropriately integrated complex dynamic system. They have since added a tenth precept, which is included in the Table below (see Table 3.2).
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Table 3.2: John and Nancy Todd’s Emerging Precepts of Biological Design (Summary based on an Jack-Todd & Todd, 1993, pp.19-92)
Percept of Design Comment or Explanation
Design has to be understood in a Gaian context in full recognition of the fundamental unity of I) The Living World is the Matrix nature and culture. Gaia theory is a crucial part of the ecological literacy required for for All Design ecological design.
Biological processes should provide the model for design that aims for appropriate II) Design Should Follow, not participation in natural process. Oppose the Laws of Life
For design and eco-technology to support biological processes in the long term it cannot III) Biological Equity Must disregard issues of social justice. Biological equity requires the just access to and distribution Determine Design of basic resources.
“For most of humanity’s evolution bioregionalism has been unselfconsciously and effortlessly IV) Design must Reflect a part of design … - culture and identity, geography, topography, climate, and indigenous Bioregionality resource base all have been for millennia silently but eloquently expressed in a manner appropriate to the bioregion” (Jack-Todd & Todd, 1993, p.45).
Using sun, wind, water, and biomass as a renewable energy source will drastically reduce the V) Projects should be Based on system-wide stress and disruption caused by the irresponsible use of fossil fuels. Renewable Energy Sources
Since the early experiments at the New Alchemy Institute the Todds and their collaborators VI) Design Should Be created designs that were distinguishable by integrative design: integration of biological and Sustainable through the mechanical systems, systems of different scales and different energy sources, as well as integrating design and function. Integration of Living Systems
“Natural systems have a kind of thrift, a built-in recycling ability, that we have foresworn VII) Design Should Be Co- during the recent, profligate past. In a very general sense the natural world eschews waste” evolutionary with the Natural (Jack-Todd & Todd, 1993, p.69). Just as design adapts biological and ecological processes to meet human needs, design should also modify human means to protect natural processes. World
“In attempting to formulate guidelines for thinking about the kind of design that will evolve VIII) Building and Design harmoniously within the natural continuum there is a factor that has been little considered should help Heal the Planet now or in the past. … We are now capable of affecting a reversal of the millennia-long tearing of the planetary fabric. We have acquired the knowledge of biology, the technology and the potential partnership in coevolution with the organic world to begin the process of planetary healing” (Jack-Todd & Todd, 1993, p.75).
This is to be understood in terms of the epistemology of the sacred proposed by Gregory IX) Design Should Follow a Bateson. It leads to the understanding that the “undifferentiated interconnectedness of the Sacred Ecology human and natural worlds in an unknowable ‘metapattern which connects’ is what we have come to think of as sacred ecology. It is the foundation and summation of all preceding precepts of design” (Jack-Todd & Todd, p.79).
When we understand design as goal directed human intention expressed through interactions X) Everyone is a Designer! and relationships, it becomes obvious that everybody is a designer. This means that the role [Note: During a course on of the professional designer is mainly in the facilitation of co-operative design processes that Ecological Design at Schumacher draw on the innately human design intelligence and diverse knowledge bases of all College the Todds added this tenth stakeholders. precept to the list.]
This list of design precepts constitutes a manifesto for ecological design and the natural design movement. During the course of this thesis all the precepts have or will be explored in significant detail. John Todd’s work on the design of ecological mesocosms – living machines
The Natural Design Movement 338 or eco-machines - is a practical scaled-down analogy of the process of co-designing with natural complex systems we are engaged in when we try to create appropriate human ecosystems and create appropriate patterns of participation in them
The difficulty of working with the living world and taking one’s cue from the patterns discernable there is the circuitous and overlapping yet incomplete nature of what one is able to perceive of its being. Processes, structures, and functions are interwoven; everything is recycled to be born again. All is motion. All is flux. Nor is everything entirely predictable (Jack-Todd & Todd, 1993, p.75).
According to John Todd, the inventor of living machines and various other living technologies, the best way to describe the science of ecological design on which these technologies are based, is to explain that all living machines, or eco-machines, use sunlight as their primary power source. They are technologies primarily powered by photosynthesis.
Eco-machines are like miniature, contained ecosystems (mesocosms). Most of their parts are not mechanical cogs and bolts, but many thousands of living organisms. In most eco- machines, these organisms live in a series of connected tanks that create a kind of artificial river.
How exactly the biological productivity of these organisms is put to use depends on the design of the particular system and the needs of society. The designers and ecological engineers who connect the various sub-ecosystems and seed them with a diversity of species and minerals can optimise their performance for a particular use, but they do so following nature’s instructions.
A Living Machine is a device made up of living organisms of all types, usually housed within a casing or structure of extremely light weight materials. Like a conventional machine it is comprised of interrelated parts with separate functions and used in the performance of some type of work. Such machines can be designed to produce fuels or food, to treat wastes, to purify air, to regulate climates or even to do all of these simultaneously. They are engineered according to the same principles found in nature to build and regulate the ecology of forests, lakes, prairies, or estuaries. Like the planet they have hydrological and mineral cycles. They are, however, totally new contained environments. John Todd (in Jack-Todd, 2005, p.168).
John’s intention has always been to learn more about the rules and methods of design that he can encounter in nature. Together with his colleagues at the New Alchemy Institute and Ocean
Arks International, he has used the instructions and information, which they collected through studying and exploring natural ecosystems, in the design of living technologies – complex dynamic systems. There are a wide variety of uses for eco-machines. Recently their potential
The Natural Design Movement 339 for interconnecting various industrial processes into symbiotic networks in the form of eco- industrial parks has been explored (see chapter 4 on industrial ecology).
Eco-machines contain an enormous diversity of living components. This diversity makes these miniature ecosystems very flexible and gives them the capacity to self-design that is inherent in natural ecosystems. Eco-machines are a practical application of many of the scientific insights discussed in chapter one. The ability to self-design, evolve and adapt that is exhibited by eco-machines, can be understood as an emergent property of complex and dynamically interconnected systems.
All the diverse living components of the eco-machine interact, connected by food-webs and nutrient cycles that can be visualized and better understood by applying a systems approach and bio-cybernetic principles involving multiple, non-liner interactions in positive and negative feedback loops.
Changes in sunlight, temperature, form and quality of available nutrients or energy, create cascades of responses throughout the entire system. A purely reductionistic and analytical approach to understanding and working with this complexity of interactions and relationships would fail to provide an understanding of their dynamics. Living technologies embrace the unpredictability and uncontrollability of natural processes and work with nature rather than aiming to tightly control the system.
The capacity of self-design in ecosystems is based to a large extend on the diversity of organisms and their relationships with each other and the particular environmental conditions of that ecosystem. The more diverse and richly interconnected a system, the easier it is for it to respond and adapt to changes. This, in turn, increases the natural resilience of the system and its overall health.
Eco-machines have the capacity to adapt to and evolve with changes in circumstances.
This means that they could potentially exist for a long time. It is also possible, with some alteration in the designed set-up, to change the human use of eco-machines during their life- time. It would be relatively easy, for example, to convert an eco-machine used for integrated horticulture and aquaculture into an eco-machine that treats wastewater.
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Living technologies harness nature’s own ingenuity. As insights from the science of complexity suggest, any system close to the edge of chaos is potentially highly creative. In other words, systems that have experienced internal and external change and have lost old structures, processes of interaction and their internal order, are at the same time less restricted and more flexible in adapting to those changes. Often it is precisely in this chaotic phase, that something new and creative emerges as an adaptive response to the overall change.
John Todd explains that throughout all his work with living technologies he has been frequently reminded that the miniature ecosystems he created knew so much more than he ever could. His aim is always to carefully guide the self-design in these systems, not to force or control them. He regards his work as a collaboration and conviviality with nature.
At its best, eco-technology uses the intrinsic intelligence found in nature. If we manage to access nature’s wisdom, we will be able to create designs that are so ecologically fitting to their surroundings that in the end these designs will cease to seem artificial as they integrate perfectly into natural process. Once the awareness that the health of humanity is fundamentally dependent on the health of the ecosystems and biosphere we inhabit spreads through all cultures, we can begin to create truly natural designs.
As participants in the wider processes and cycles of the natural world, and in the continued evolution of life, we are all nature’s designs. Once nature is understood to include and nurture culture, one begins to comprehend how everything is fundamentally natural. The artificial designs we create nevertheless participate and affect natural process. They can do so benignly or beneficially – and therefore appropriately -, or they can harm and disrupt the life- support systems within eco-systems and the biosphere – and therefore participate inappropriately and unsustainably. Living technologies aim for appropriate participation in natural process!
The truth is, that the distinctions we make between the natural and the artificial are profoundly confusing. It would be better to distinguish between things that integrate in a benign or even beneficial way into the co-evolution of life and the environment, and things that through disrupting natural cycles reduce human health, by reducing the health of the natural systems that ultimately nurture us.
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The ecological designs, created by John Todd, would definitely belong to the former category. Based on a deep understanding of ecological processes and interactions, living technologies aim to provide solutions to meet human necessities while integrating in an appropriate way into the natural cycles of their immediate and global environment.
My description of living machines so far has been mainly based on a deeply instructive paper published in the Journal of Ecological Engineering, by John Todd and Beth Josephson.
The paper explains the various design principles of eco-machines in detail. They identify twelve important components that should be part of the design of living technologies (Todd &
Josephson, 1996). These principles have been recently summarized in a less detailed and technical fashion by Nancy Jack-Todd and are reproduced in the box below (see Box 3.13).
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Box 3.13: Design Principles for the Creation of Living Technologies (Reproduced from Jack-Todd, 2005, pp.162-163; based on Todd & Josephson, 1996)
1. Geological and mineral diversity must be present to evolve the biological responsiveness of rich soils.
2. Nutrient reservoirs are essential to keep such essentials as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium available for the plants.
3. Steep gradients between subcomponents must be engineered into the system to enable the biological elements to evolve rapidly to assist in the breakdown of toxic materials.
4. High rates of exchange must be created by maximizing surface areas that house the bacteria that determine the metabolism of the system and facilitate treatment.
5. Periodic and random pulsed exchanges improve performance. Just as random perturbations foster resilience in nature, in living technologies alternating water flow creates self-organization in the system.
6. Cellular design is the structural model as it is in nature where cells are the organizing unit. Expansion of a system should also use a cellular model, as in increasing the number of tanks.
7. A law of the minimum must be incorporated. At least three ecosystems such as a marsh, a pond, and a terrestrial area are needed to perform the assigned function and maintain overall stability.
8. Microbial communities must be introduced periodically from the natural world to maintain diversity and facilitate evolutionary processes.
9. Photosynthetic foundations are essential as oxygen-producing plants foster ecosystems that require less energy, aeration, and chemical management.
10. Phylogenetic diversity must be encouraged as a range of aquatic animals from the unicellular to snails to fish are as essential to the evolution and self-maintenance of the system as the plants.
11. Sequenced and repeated seedings are part of maintenance as a self-contained system cannot be isolated but must be interlinked through gaseous, nutrient, mineral, and biological pathways to the external environment.
12. Ecological design should reflect the macrocosmos in the microcosmos, representing the natural world miniaturized and reflecting its proportions, as in terrestrial to oceanic and aquatic areas.
The living technologies developed by John Todd are of extremely high educational value to the natural design movement. As a mesocosm scale analogy, the study of living machines and their design principles can be used to introduce designers to important insights about the dynamics of health and resilience found in large scale ecosystems. Eco-machines offer opportunities for experiential ecological learning from which all designers could benefit. To engage in their design or maintenance will be rewarded by an ecologically literate understanding which makes
The Natural Design Movement 343 natural complexity more intelligible. John Todd explains the insights they mediate and the enormous potential for their widespread application:
[Eco-machines] are fundamentally different from conventional machines or biotechnologies. They represent, in essence, the intelligence of the forest or the lake applied to human ends. Like the forest or lake, their primary source of power is the sun. Like natural ecosystems they have the capability to self- design. They rely on biotic diversity for self-repair and protection, and for overall system efficiency. Their metabolism involves such independent qualities of life forms as replication, feeding, and waste excretion in dynamic balance with interdependent functions like gas, mineral, and nutrient exchanges. The potential contributions of such ecological engines to the twenty-first century are portentous. They require only one time use of fossil fuels in manufacture. They reintegrate wastes into larger systems and break down toxic materials or, in the case of metals, lock them up in long cycles. They have the potential to help feed people year round, especially in urban areas. Widespread implementation of these living technologies could release natural systems from bondage. By miniaturizing the footprint of essential human services they would return wild nature to its own devices and allow for the restoration of large tracts of wilderness. John Todd (in Jack-Todd, 2005, p.168).
Another important approach to the co-design of complex systems that has been for the most part neglected in academic discourse is the permaculture design approach. Bill Mollison and David
Holmgren first developed this design approach in the early 1970s, working on what they called an interdisciplinary earth science. It is often misunderstood as simply an organic approach to agriculture, but permaculture is much more. It is yet another holistically oriented participatory design system that aims to meet human needs while integrating appropriately in natural process.
As such, the permaculture movement could be described as yet another manifestation of the emerging natural design movement. Its underlying intention is clearly salutogenic. Its aim is to integrate humanity sustainability into the life-support systems of the biosphere.
While permaculture has up until very recently been entirely ignored by institutions of higher education, the movement itself has established an extremely effective system of courses and sequential training steps, which have enabled it to create a vast international network in the last thirty years.
There are not only permaculture networks in many countries on most continents, but also locally active permaculture groups in many of the planet’s bioregions. As such, the permaculture network is in itself following natural design principles of co-operative, bottom-up,
The Natural Design Movement 344 networks within networks. The basic permaculture design curriculum proposed by Bill
Mollison was 140 contact hours and covered a wide range of design topics. Mollison explains:
Permaculture … is the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way. Without permanent agriculture [permaculture] there is no possibility of a stable social order. Permaculture design is a system of assembling conceptual, material, and strategic components in a pattern which functions to benefit life in all its forms. The philosophy behind permaculture is one of working with, rather than against, nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless action; of looking at systems in all their functions, rather than asking only one yield of them; and of allowing systems to demonstrate their own evolutions (Mollison, 1988, p.ix)
Permaculture is a remarkably detailed design system that has gained enormously from its grass roots and activism based research projects all over the world. Despite its original development for an Australian climate, there are now insightful publications and instructive practical projects in a diverse range of climate zones and ecosystems. Permaculture is founded on the ‘principle of cooperation.’ It assumes: “Cooperation, not competition, is the very basis of existing life systems and of future survival” (Mollison, 1988, p.2).
Mollison believes: “The role of beneficial authority is to return function and responsibility to life and to people; if successful, no further authority is needed. The role of successful design is to create a self-managed system” (Mollison, 1988, p.11). This clearly reflects that permaculture does not aim to predict and control systems but rather hopes to facilitate the emergence of healthy self-management on all scales.
Mollison pointed out: “In chaos lies unparalleled opportunity for imposing creative order” (Mollison, 1988, p.12). Permaculture is a participatory approach of careful and empathic observation and humble participation by trial and error. It works with rather than against uncertainty and unpredictability. It is clearly an appropriate system of co-designing complex systems. Some basic principles of permaculture, as they were proposed by Mollison are summarized in the box below (see Box 3.14).
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Box 3.14: Bill Mollison’s Permaculture Design Principles: (Reproduced and adapted from Mollison, 1988, pp.15-16)
1. Work with nature, rather than against it We can assist rather than impede natural elements, forces, pressures, processes, agencies, and evolutions.
2. The problem is the solution Everything works both ways. It is only how we see things that makes them advantageous or not. Everything is a positive resources; it is up to us to work out how we may use it as such. A designer may recognize a specific site characteristic as either a problem or as a unique feature capable of several uses.
3. Make the least change for the greatest possible effect. For example when choosing a dam site, select the area where you get the most water for the least amount of earth moved.
4. The yield of a system is theoretically unlimited The only limit on the number of uses of a resource possible within a system is in the limit of the information and imagination of the designer.
5. Everything gardens Or, everything has an effect on its environment. When we examine how plants and animals change ecosystems, we may find many allies in our efforts to sustain ourselves and other species.
These permaculture design principles are useful advice in the co-design of complex human ecosystems. Bill Mollision’s classic book Permaculture – A Designers’ Manual remains a very useful and informative text, both as an in-depth introduction to permaculture and as a practical design manual in the creation of integrated human ecosystems or productive permaculture landscapes (see Mollison, 1988).
A wide variety of people have published on permaculture design. I will refrain from an extensive literature review here. There are also a wide range of lists of permaculture design principles, I will mention only a couple of them to corroborate the fact that permaculture is now a healthy and diverse movement that has more than one formulation of its underlying principles and does not slavishly follow the instructions of some founder-guru. Jill Hovey provides an insightful and concise description of the design philosophy that informs permaculture design activists (see Box 3.15).
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Box 3.15: The Permaculture Design Philosophy (Summarizes and adapted from Hovey, 2000, pp.101-102)
Permaculture is a philosophy that informs an approach to planning, designing, building, and maintaining sustainable systems, the ultimate expression of which would be sustainable communities. It focuses on efficiently satisfying true human needs (not to be confused with consumer-induced “wants”) and nonhuman needs, through a co-creative process with nature and other people. Permaculture draws on the knowledge of natural systems, and attempts to emulate their diversity, resilience, stability, and abundance, through the application of six basic permaculture principles:
1. Use Nature as Your Model: Observe, intuit, and replicate patterns in human-constructed systems, working co-creatively with nature. Use biological resources to perform work, save energy, and produce needed materials locally. Create diversity by maximizing the edges or transitions of the system, which are highly productive biologically.
2. Emphasize Connections and Create Redundancy: Design for multiple functions aiming for at least three uses for each element. Design so that many elements support each function. Acknowledge that the connections are very important. Set up working relationships among plants, animals, people, land, and structures so that the needs of one component are met by the yields of another component.
3. Plan for Relative Locations: Place design components in such a relationship that allows for useful connections. It may be helpful to divide space into various zones according to human usage patterns, placing elements according to their frequency of use. Design small-scale, intensive systems. Start with your back door, and work outward.
4. Keep the Natural Elements and Disturbances from outside in Mind: Design your site, process or product to work with the patterns and effects of incoming energies, such as sun, wind, precipitation, fire, noise and smell.
5. Design for Energy Cycling: Make maximum potential usage of the energies available on site. Employ designs that capture, store and cycle energy efficiently.
6. Ethics: Care for the Earth and its people are fundamental tenants of permaculture. Look to the distribution of surplus, with distinctions between needs and wants.
These design principles again reiterate many of the common themes that run through the different design approaches discussed in this thesis. Despite a high degree of overlap between the various sets of principles offered by the different contributories of the natural design movement, I have chosen to repeat such principles in order to show that a common theme for sustainable design is already emerging.
In the natural sciences, it is considered corroborative evidence in support of a working hypothesis when various groups of independently operating researchers repeat the same experiment and reach similar or the same results. While the complexity of the interrelated subjects areas we are dealing with in natural and sustainable design requires us to go beyond the
The Natural Design Movement 347 traditional scientific method, it is nevertheless reassuring that there is a common theme emerging that indicates how to design for appropriate participation in natural process.
Perhaps the greatest single lesson that the study of ecology has had for humankind is that things work in wholes. The characteristics of an ecosystem cannot be predicted from adding up the characteristics of its parts. It’s an integrated system in which all the parts interact to form a complex whole. In fact it has become clear that the Earth herself works in a very similar fashion will all her different components interacting in a way that maintains conditions suitable for life (Whitefield, 2004, p.35)
One of Britain’s most respected and experienced practitioners and teachers of the permaculture design approach, Patrick Whitefield, recently published a thorough and comprehensive handbook for permaculture in temperate climate zones, entitled The Earth Care Manual. The fundamental aim of sustainable design has to be to integrate human activity and the way we meet our needs into the interacting process of that whole, referred to as the biosphere, planet
Earth, or Gaia. Sustainability is about participating in a way that we maintain and support the conditions suitable for life. Whitefield believes: “We have a window of opportunity. We have a chance to change our ways of feeding, clothing and housing ourselves to one which is both high-yielding and sustainable. The future can be permanently abundant” (Whitefield, 2004, p.37).
The global ecovillage movement, which I will describe in more detail in chapter four, has taken up the permaculture design approach most successfully in the design of intentionally sustainable human communities all over the world. The Swiss engineer, Max Lindegger, has been instrumental in creating ‘The Crystal Waters Permaculture Village’ in Australia, as an effective, living example of how permaculture can be applied successfully on a community scale. His international design consultancy ‘Ecological Solutions’ provides aspiring ecovillage communities all over the world with the necessary skills and community based methodologies to integrate their settlements sustainably into the unique conditions of their local habitat.
Lindegger describes the application of permaculture to ecovillage design as follows:
One may call it Holistic design. Each element should have a reason for being included and be well and thoroughly considered. Ultimately, the connections between the elements are what will make or break the design … A well-planned design is fairly certain to avoid bad mistakes but it will be no guarantee for instant happiness, spiritual enlightenment or ongoing wealth. However having taken the first step safely, the next one may be a little bit easier … for wealth, health and happiness (Lindegger, 2002, p.23).
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At the beginning of this thesis I defined design broadly as intentionality expressed through interactions and relationships. The sustainable design approach that is common to all members of the emerging natural design movement, is to attempt to become more aware and conscious of all the interacting elements we have to consider in order to created and participate in healthy and sustainable, complex systems. As Lindegger emphasizes, ultimately it is the connection between the elements that will make or break the design. In a fundamentally interconnected world there are many such connections to consider if we hope to engage in salutogenic design.
This is undeniably a complex challenge to human beings as wise co-designers and interpreters of meaning (Homo sapiens designans), but if we consider what is at stake – the future of humanity and the continued evolution of consciousness in the universe – is there a more meaningful and appropriate challenge to devote our lives to?
Yet again I would like to emphasize that the subject of co-designing healthy complex dynamic systems cannot be exhausted in a single chapter, nor a single volume. There will never be an end point to the challenge of creating a healthy and sustainable human civilization on a healthy planet. Natural systems are in a process of continuous and intermittent change and therefore the process of learning how to integrate humanity sustainably into this process will never stop. This thesis hopes to provide a framework of salutogenic, sustainable design that participates appropriately in natural process. It is a framework for a collective, community- and place-based participatory process of learning, not a list of definite solutions of how to co-design complex systems.
The best nature-compatible new designs – whether products, buildings, technologies, or communities – are sensitive to living systems with which they come into contact, accomplishing their mission without undesirable side effects as pollutions, erosion, congestion, and stress. These “deep” designs increase options, flexibility, cultural equity, and individual power. … While shallow designs are anonymous and generic, providing nothing but materialistic satisfaction, deep design is informed with craftsmanship and quality for lasting satisfaction. Deep design acknowledges biological and cultural health as well as material wealth (Wann, 1996, pp.xiii-xiv).
In Deep Design – Pathways to a Livable Future, David Wann offers a response to the challenge of co-designing complex systems. “What we do for the earth, we do for ourselves. This is the holistic pragmatism of deep design, the convergence of economics, physics, biology and ethics”
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(Wann, 1996, p.22). He presages the future development of the natural design movement in suggesting that “as we enter the new millennium, breakthroughs in our understanding of how nature works will enable as revolutionary new alliance among biology, chemistry, and physics, as well as sociology and economics, with design as a key catalyst” (Wann, 1996, p.21). He explains:
Deep design is informed design, but it makes a leap of faith beyond information into imagination and intuition. It might be thought of as a catalyst that converts the visionary into the useful, or gravity that pulls untried concepts down to earth. Deep designs work because they fit, that is, they contribute to the good of society and of the biosphere. An analogy is natural design (Wann, 1996, p.32).
Bringing spirit into form, conscious and responsible participation in the material and immaterial dimensions of natural process, envisioning attainable utopias and turning them into reality, that is the promise of deep design and of the natural design movement. Ultimately, sustainable design is the co-creative agency of humanity expressed in full awareness of our fundamental unity with the world around us – conscious and responsible participation in uni-verse!
Box 3.16: David Wann’s Concepts and Criteria of Deep Design (Reproduced from Wann, 1996, pp.144-145)
Deep Design Concepts: Ecological Wisdom Live within the ecological and resource limits of the planet. Apply technological knowledge to the challenge of an energy efficient economy… better relationship between urban and rural … guarantee rights of non-human species….Promote and respect self- regulating natural systems.
Respect for Diversity Honour cultural, ethnic, racial, sexual, religious, and spiritual diversity of all beings within the context of individual responsibility. Respect and maintain biodiversity, or a diversity of living species.
Global Responsibility Maintain awareness of the impacts of our actions on global, ecological, economic, and social systems.
Focus on the Future Help institutions and individuals think in terms of the long-range future, not just short term selfish interests. , make quality of life, rather than open-ended economic growth, the focus of future thinking.
Inter-relatedness, Interdependence, and natural Process Learn these lessons from the ecosystems we are part of.
Soft-Energy Production Alternatives Work with the cycles of the sun, water, wind, and geothermal energy rather than depleting finite resources that can be more effectively used elsewhere.
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Select Appropriate technologies, Regenerative Agriculture, and Minimal-Impact Waste Strategies for Radiation By-products and Unrecyclable Wastes Use the right tool for the right job. Less waste means less clean up, less conflict, and fewer costs.
Trace the Origins and Future Destination of each store Component/System Don’t let actions taken in the present leave a gaping hole in the future.
Incorporate Biology and Physics into Design
Deep Design Criteria: · Use design solutions that accomplish three or four things at once. For example, plants conserve water, reduce erosion, soak up green house forming carbon dioxide, and have a cooling effect on urban landscape all at the same time. · Account for costs with the full life-time of the product in mind. What environmental costs are not accounted for we will pay for in taxes, poor health, or a deteriorating quality of life. · Design for the future. Think about future use, reuse, or disposal requirements of a given material when designing it. In the area of disposal, design for natural processes like decomposition and nutrient cycles. · When designing, think about whether the user will be able to understand the result, maintain it, and feel satisfied with it. · Design to increase, rather than to limit people’s options. · Design to enhance users’ self-reliance and self-worth, rather than creating dependencies and insecurity. · Design to tale maximum advantage of existing infrastructure and recyclable resources. · Design to enhance creative thinking. · Design to accommodate household hazardous waste products. · Design to allow point-of sale recovery of packaging materials · Design with consideration of the specific site – existing ecosystems, location relative to transport system, proximity to community environmental infrastructure, etc · Design to enhance the educational possibility of the store. · Design using systems and materials that are flexible enough to accommodate improvements and retrofits. · Design to avoid groundwater and surface contamination. · Minimize the use of off-site electrical energy for heating and cooling, with effective design, load reduction, and on-site production of energy. 145 · Reduce “embodied energy” costs, or life-cycle costs of materials and systems, including extraction, manufacturing, shipping, and disposal costs. · Compensate for negative impacts created by developing off-site positive systems. · Limit painted surfaces as well as surfaces requiring adhesives, carpet, or solvent-based maintenance with floor wax, polish, cleaners, etc. · Minimize construction waste by finding recycling markets. · Develop vendor partnerships to ensure the ecological manufacture/supply of packaging, building materials, and store merchandise. · Increase daylighting systems and reduce electrical lighting requirements. · Minimize transportation-associated energy use and pollution (both customer and operations) · Reduce impervious surfaces that also retain heat. Reduce heat where possible, and use alternative surfaces for parking, roof surfaces, etc. · Landscape using native species, xeriscaping, and low-maintenance species. · Create opportunities for energy savings through passive design such as building volume, geometry, footprint, etc.
While this list of concepts and criteria of deep design (see Box 3.16) is far from complete, it nevertheless serves as an appropriate preview of the kind of specific details of sustainable
The Natural Design Movement 351 design that the natural design movement has to direct its attention to in order to create healthy and sustainable human communities and societies. The concepts and criteria of deep design listed by Wann will almost all be re-addressed in the following chapters as we move from the realm of theory and contextualisation into a practice oriented description of the various scales on which sustainable design operates.
Many of the approaches encompassed in the natural design movement have the tendency to focus on a particular scale. One of the great promises of the natural design movement becoming more aware of itself in the formation of national and international natural design competence networks is that we will become more able to create scale -linking synergies that will strengthen the health of the overall system.
Janis Birkeland points out that “ecological design, as an approach to social and environmental problem solving, deals with complex open systems, so it would be inappropriate to specify a fixed set of solutions.” She sees the role of the responsible designer in inventing
“new systems which improve the quality of life of human experience, while simultaneously restoring the environment, rebuilding community and creating a sense of place” (Birkeland,
2002, p.2).
Hargrove and Smith recently emphasized: “Design practice reform is about ensuring that ‘thinking green’ is a focus of the entire design process, requiring collaboration and mutual incentives to drive the team to new levels of achievements” (2005, p.364). They summarize
Birkeland’s holistic approach to co-designing complex systems in the Box below (see Box
3.17).
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Box 3.17: A Holistic, Whole Systems Approach to Eco-Development: (After Janis Birkeland, reproduced and adapted from Hargroves & Smith, 2005, p.365)
· Meeting social, economic, ecological and cultural needs in addition to being eco-efficient;
· Improving basic environmental systems, not just reducing impacts (e.g. water and air quality, energy
production, soil fertility, etc.);
· Meeting human psychological needs (e.g. places for positive social interaction, communion with
nature, sense of community);
· Optimising the use of urban spaces to increase biodiversity, natural habitats and ecosystem services
(i.e. not relying on the surrounding region as a source or sink).
· Improving community health and welfare (e.g. equity, sense of place, safety, healthy materials);
· Increasing the conditions for biophysical-ecological welfare and increasing natural capital (i.e. not
just respect carrying capacity).
· Avoiding fibres, fuels, foods and processes that are linked to the fossil fuel supply chain.
The Rocky Mountain Institute, established by Amory and Hunter Lovins in 1982, has been an important midwife for a more sustainable future. Their approach has always been conscious of the fundamental interconnections within the complex system that contains all our designs. Its work on ecological or natural design solutions has affected government policy and industry in various countries.
The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) is “an entrepreneurial nonprofit organization that fosters the efficient restorative use of resources to create a more secure, prosperous, and life sustaining world” (RMI, 2000). With emphasis on the fact that I consider all the design approaches and individual contributors mentioned in this thesis as belonging to the natural design movement, let me end this chapter with a summary of the Rocky Mountain Institutes core principles (Box 3.18).
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Box 3.18: The Rocky Mountain Institute’s Core Principles: (reproduced and adapted from RMI, 2000)
Advanced Resource Productivity: At the heart of all our work is a simple but powerful notion: using natural resources much more productively – efficiently – is both profitable and better for the environment. Indeed, integrative design often makes resource savings work better and cost less than small ones.
Systems Thinking: Designers and decision-makers too often define problems narrowly, without identifying their deeper causes or connections. This merely shifts or multiplies problems. Systems thinking – the opposite of that dis-integrated approach – typically reveals lasting, elegantly frugal solutions with multiple benefits, which enable us to transcend ideological battles and unite all parties around shared goals.
Positive Action: We don’t lobby, litigate, or harass those with whom we disagree. Rather than focussing on problems and assigning blame, we find better ways of meeting human needs that turn snowballing costs and problems into cascading savings and solutions.
Market-oriented Solutions: We believe in working with markets, not against them. Our solutions achieve high leverage by harnessing competitive forces and the economic self-interest of firms and individuals. At the same time, we seek to correct market failures that needlessly pit human and corporate interests against those of the environment. In this way, obstacles are transformed into business opportunities.
End-use/least-cost Approach: For a quarter-century, RMI’s concept of finding the best and cheapest way to do each desired task – rather than simply expanding supply without regard to the right amount, quality, and scale – has offered penetrating and successful insights into a wide range of resource issues.
Biological Insight: Nature offers extraordinary design solutions honed by 3.8 billion years’ rigorous testing in which whatever didn’t work got recalled by the Manufacturer. Using nature as mentor, model, and measure often yields superior design solutions that profitably eliminate waste, loss, and harm.
Corporate Transformation: We view the corporate world, which environmental groups often dismiss as “the problem,” as an essential part of the solution. Our work particularly influences corporations because they possess the combination of skills, resources, agility, and motivation – profit – to address humanity’s most pressing challenges.
Natural Capitalism: These approaches form the backdrop for natural capitalism, a new and rapidly spreading business model that harnesses environmental performance as an engine of competitive advantage. RMI’s activities are increasingly based on this thesis, detailed in the book Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. (Source: Rocky Mountain Institute; www.rmi.org )
Whether the label given to the emerging movement will be natural, holistic, ecological, integral or salutogenic design does not really matter in the end. What does matter is that we begin to recognize the potential benefit of designing and planning from a more holistic perspective and begin to participate appropriately in natural process. To do so we will have to integrate and link design, planning and decision making across temporal and spatial scales.
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In the history of the biosphere of planet earth, a millennium is but a moment. In much less than a thousand years humanity has brought the biosphere – the giver of products essential for life, living space, quality-of- life, variety-of-life and national economies – to crisis point. The biosphere is now giving us many signals that it is greatly stressed; that it is struggling to cope with natural resource depletion, ozone depletion, acid rain, ecosystem loss, polluted air, land rivers oceans. Yet our future depends on it. Much has been written about the traumas facing Earth. There has been loss of biodiversity, not just genes and species, but of ecosystems and functional processes necessary to support healthy living communities including human ones – social systems relying on productive agriculture, goods, services and trade. The large spatial (and temporal), even global, scale of these interrelated and synergistic ailments are also beginning to be understood, or at least recognized (Brunckhorst, 2000, p.vii).
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