GUEST ESSAY
The Ecological Design Arts
David W. Orr
David W. Orr is chair of environmental studies at Oberlin
College in Ohio and one of the nation’s most respected
environmental educators. He is the author of numerous
environmental articles and three books, including
Ecological Literacy, Earth in Mind, The Nature of Design:
Ecology, Culture, and Human Intention, and The Last
Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age
of Terror. With help from students, faculty, and
townspeople, he used ecological design to build an innovative environmental studies
building at Oberlin College.
If Homo sapiens sapiens entered its industrial civilization in an intergalactic design
competition, it would be tossed out in the qualifying round. It does not fit. It will not
last. The scale is wrong, and even its defenders admit that it’s not very pretty. The
most glaring design failures of industrial and technologically driven societies are the
loss of diversity of all kinds, impending climate change, pollution, and soil erosion.
Of course, industrial civilization was not designed at all; it was mostly
imposed by single-minded individuals, armed with one doctrine of human progress or
another, each requiring a homogenization of nature and society. These individuals for
the most part had little or no knowledge of ecological design arts or understanding of
ecological principles.
Good ecological design incorporates understanding about how nature works and
sustains itself into the ways we design, build, live in or use. When human artifacts
and systems are well designed, they are in harmony with the ecological patterns in
which they are embedded. When poorly designed, they undermine those larger
patterns, creating pollution, higher costs, and social stress.
Good ecological design has certain common characteristics, including correct
scale, simplicity, efficient use of resources, taking advantage of nature’s free
ecological services, a close fit between means and ends, durability, redundancy, and
resilience. These characteristics often are place-specific, or, in John Todd’s words,
“elegant solutions predicated on the uniqueness of place.”
Copyright ©2005 Brooks/Cole, a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Thomson Learning
is a trademark used herein under license.
Good design also solves more than one problem at a time and promotes
human competence, efficient and frugal resource use, and sound regional
economies. Where good design becomes part of the social fabric at all levels,
unanticipated positive side effects multiply. When people fail to design with
ecological competence, unwanted side effects and disasters multiply.
The pollution, violence, social decay, and waste around us indicate that we
have designed things badly, for, I think, three primary reasons. First, as long as land
and energy were cheap and the world was relatively empty, we did not need to
master the discipline of good design. The result was sprawling cities, wasteful
economies, waste dumped into the environment, bigger and less efficient
automobiles and buildings, and conversion of entire forests into junk mail and
Kleenex—all in the name of economic growth and convenience.
Second, design intelligence fails when greed, narrow self-interest, and
individualism take over. Good design is a cooperative community process in which
people work together to make their communities more sustainable and more livable
as has been done in Curitiba, Brazil, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Most American
cities, with their extremes of poverty and opulence, are products of people who
believe they have little in common with one another. Greed, suspicion, and fear
undermine good community and good design alike.
Third, poor design results from poorly equipped minds. Only people who
understand harmony, patterns, and systems can do good design. Good design
requires a breadth of view that causes people to ask how human artifacts and
purposes fit within a particular culture and place. It also requires ecological
intelligence, by which I mean an intimate familiarity with how nature works.
An example of good ecological design is found in John Todd’s living machines,
which are carefully orchestrated ensembles of plants, aquatic animals, technology,
solar energy, and high-tech materials to purify wastewater, but without the expense,
energy use, and chemical hazards of conventional sewage treatment technology.
Todd’s living machines resemble greenhouses filled with plants and aquatic animals.
Wastewater enters at one end and purified water leaves at the other. In between, a
variety of organisms driven by sunlight use and remove nutrients, break down
toxins, and incorporate heavy metals in plant tissues.
Ecological design standards also apply to the making of public policy. For
example, the Clean Air Act of 1970 required car manufacturers to install catalytic
converters to remove air pollutants. Over three decades later, emissions per vehicle
Copyright ©2005 Brooks/Cole, a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Thomson Learning
is a trademark used herein under license.
are down substantially, but because more cars are on the road, air quality is about
the same—an example of inadequate ecological design. A sounder design would
involve designing motor vehicles that emit little or no pollution into the atmosphere.
Even more important it would design or redesign urban transportation systems that
reduce dependence on motor vehicles building better public transit systems,
restoring and improving railroads, and creating networks of bike trails and walkways.
An education in the ecological design arts would equip people to build
households, institutions, farms, communities, corporations, and economies that do
not emit carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases, operate on renewable energy,
preserve biological diversity, recycle material and organic wastes, and promote
sustainable local and regional economies.
The outline of a curriculum in ecological design arts can be found in recent work in
ecological restoration, ecological engineering, solar design, landscape architecture,
sustainable agriculture, sustainable forestry, energy efficiency, ecological economics,
and least-cost, end-use analysis. A program in ecological design would weave these
and similar elements together around actual design objectives that aim to make
students smarter about systems and about how specific things and processes fit in
their ecological context. With such an education we can develop the habits of mind,
analytical skills, and practical competence needed to help sustain the earth for us
and other species.
Critical Thinking
1.
Does your school offer courses or a curriculum in ecological design? If not,
suggest some reasons why it does not.
2.
Use Orr’s ideas about good ecological design to evaluate how well your
school campus is designed. Suggest ways to improve its design.
Copyright ©2005 Brooks/Cole, a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Thomson Learning
is a trademark used herein under license.