294 Ecological Restoration and Design
level of harmony. For the ancient Jews, the basis of order was otherworldly, a moral
order evident in the Laws God delivered to Moses. For the builders of the great
cathedrals, that belief was extended into architectural form blending Greek geometry
with Judeo-Christian theology in service to the idea that inspired humans could
design so artfully as to create sacred spaces that were a portion of heaven on earth.
The fourth great design revolution, built on modern science, presumed a more
remote God who had once created a clockwork universe and had the good sense
thereafter not to meddle with it. Isaac Newton deciphered the scientific laws God
had presumably used and rendered these into the metaphor of a cosmic machine.
Adam Smith took that metaphor to describe our tendency to truck and barter as
the working out of an invisible hand administering the laws of supply and demand
in a mechanistic world. In the fourth revolution, the economy of Adam Smith is
the ultimate machine, godlike in its ability to sift order from the chaos of indi-
vidual self-interest. We continue to live in that faith, now extended to a further
abstraction called the global economy.
Each of the design revolutions in some degree persists like geologic layers.
Unlike the scientific revolutions described by Thomas Kuhn in which one para-
digm overthrows another, less adequate, our sense of order is a kind of lamination
in which earlier thinking persists whether in science, social structures, language or
even commonplace superstitions. Each transformation in our understanding of
how to make the human presence on Earth surrendered in due course to time,
human frailty, and their particular flaws, but did not thereby disappear. The meg-
alithic belief in a larger order evident in the rising and setting of the sun, lunar
cycles, and movements of the stars survives in the belief that patterns of ecology
represent a larger ordering applicable to human systems. So too, the belief that
human reason might yet bring order from unreason and caprice. The Greek exper-
iment in rationality survived and flourished in the Christian era as part of what
Arthur O. Lovejoy once described as ‘the great chain of being’ (1936/1974). If
humans had the capacity of reason, might they not also discern the very mind of
God. The neo-platonism of the medieval world, in Lovejoy’s words, ‘rested at bot-
tom upon a faith ... that the universe is a rational order ... a coherent, luminous,
intellectually secure and dependable world, in which the mind of man could go
about its business of seeking an understanding of things in full confidence’ (Love-
joy, 1936, pp327–328). Faith in a rational order and the powers of rationality
survives into our time, magnified by the Enlightenment of the 18th century into
the creed of inevitable progress. The faith of the medieval churchmen survives not
just in the millennarian assumptions of nearly every ideological movement, but in
the belief that what we made on Earth ought to reflect higher obligations than
those of self-interest. That, too, is an echo of the ancient belief in a divine order
that would lead to a final triumph of right.
The increasingly homogeneous industrial civilization that now stretches
around the Earth is the signature accomplishment of the fourth revolution, but its
future is troubled for reasons that any moderately well-informed high school stu-
dent could recite. Its prospects are clouded, first, because it is inflicting a rising