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.