16
Ecological Design and Education
David W. Orr
Ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell
you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea
will declare to you.
Job: 7–9When you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but
must also repair the world around it, and within it so that the larger world at
that one place becomes more coherent and more whole; and the thing which
you make takes its place in the web of nature as you make it.
Christopher AlexanderBackground
Imagine living in a random world without order in which no rules applied, and
effects followed no discernible pattern of cause. Such a world would be alien to
intelligence, morality and foresight, governed instead by caprice and whimsy,
which is to say that it would be a kind of Hell. Design presumes, on the contrary,
that matter is ordered and that order matters. But to the questions of exactly what
is ordered and how there is no one answer. The more we know, the more mysteri-
ous the world appears to be. Beyond the regularities of changing seasons, birth and
death, the world that we experience is often chaotic and violent governed as much
by fate as by foresight. But even that awareness fuels the effort to discover larger
patterns, mastery of which will permit us to establish safe haven or, for some,
heaven on earth. For the builders of megalithic monuments like Stonehenge, the
clues to order lay in the observed regularities of the night sky and the movements
of the sun, moon, and stars. The Greeks, believers in the possibility of reason,
discovered geometrical proportions and mathematical harmony in the world.
Some believed that cultivation of reason might lead to societies in which reasona-
ble men might collaborate to manage public affairs democratically, yet another
Reproduced by permission of SAGE Publication, London, Los Angeles, New Delhi and Singapore,
from Pretty J et al (eds) Sage Handbook on Environment and Society, copyright (© Orr D, 2007).