296 Ecological Restoration and Design
solve it after it has been perceived, and failure to succeed in attempts to solve it’
(Diamond, 2005, p438). In our time the inability to perceive and to solve problems
is often related to our faith in technology that leads some to believe that we are mas-
ters of nature and smart enough to manage it in perpetuity. That presumption, in
turn, rests on an improbably rosy view of human capabilities and the faith, as Robert
Sinsheimer (1978) once put it that nature sets no traps for unwary species.
Our optimism is, I think, a product of a particular era in human history shaped
by the one-time drawdown of cheap fossil fuels, the ‘age of exuberance’ in William
Catton’s words. Our politics, economics, education as well as personal expecta-
tions were shaped by the assumption that we had at last solved the age-old problem
of energy. Ancient sunlight fuelled rapid economic growth, vastly increased mobil-
ity and agricultural productivity, and a level of affluence that our ancestors could
not imagine. But it also weakened social cohesion, encouraged over-consumption,
polluted our air and water, contaminated our politics, while creating a fragile and
temporary energetic basis for the most complex human civilization ever.
Unfortunately, complex societies are vulnerable to breakdown for many rea-
sons. Anthropologist, Joseph Tainter, summarizes these by saying that:
as stresses necessarily arise, new organizational and economic solutions must be devel-
oped, typically at increasing costs and declining marginal return. The marginal return
on investment in complexity accordingly deteriorates slowly at first and then accelerates.
At this point, a complex society reaches the phase where it becomes increasingly vulner-
able to collapse (Tainter, 1988, p195).In other words, even with foresight we fail to anticipate problems which outrun
solutions thereby aggregating into crises, then into a system-wide crisis of crises,
the sense of care, always a limited resource, falters, human ingenuity, however
considerable, fails, and things come tumbling down (Homer-Dixon, 2000). The
story is an old one – lack of vision, the intoxication of power, tragedy, arrogance,
stupidity and angry gods.
Toward a Design Science
The fox, it is said, knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
Ecological designers, like the hedgehog, know one big thing – that everything is
hitched to everything else as systems within still larger systems and patterns that
connect across species, space and time. Ecological design begins in the recognition
that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, that unpredictable properties
emerge at different scales, and as a result that we live in a world of surprise and
mystery. Those who design with nature work in the recognition that the world is
one and indivisible, that what goes round comes around, that life is more para-
doxical than we can ever know, and that health, healing, wholeness and holy, too,
are inseparable. Ecological design is the careful meshing of human purposes with