Ecological Design and Education 297the patterns and flows of the natural world and the study of those patterns to
inform human intentions, leaving a margin for error, malfeasance and the unknown.
Ecological design requires an efficiency revolution in the use of energy and materi-
als, a transition to renewable energy, changes in land use and community design,
the transition to economies that preserve natural capital, and a recalibration of
political and legal systems with ecological realities.
The origins of ecological design can be traced back into our prehistoric ances-
tors’ interest in natural regularities of seasons, sun, moon and stars, as well as in the
Greek conviction that humans, by the application of reason, could discern the laws
of nature. Ecological design also rests on the theological conviction that we are
obliged, not merely constrained, to respect larger harmonies and patterns. The
Latin root word for the word religion – bind together – and the Greek root for
ecology – household management – suggest a deeper compatibility and connec-
tion to order. Ecological design, further, builds on the science and technology of
the industrial age, but for the purpose of establishing a partnership with nature,
not domination. The first models of ecological design can be found in vernacular
architecture and the practical arts that are as old as recorded history. It is, accord-
ingly, as much a recovery of old and established knowledge as discovery of any-
thing new. The arts of building, agriculture, forestry, health care and economy
were sometimes practised sustainably in cultures that we otherwise might dismiss
as primitive. The art of applied wholeness was implicit in social customs such as
the observance of the Sabbath and Holy days, and the Jubilee year or the practise
of potlatch in which debts were forgiven and wealth was recirculated. It is evident
still in all of those various ways by which communities and societies gracefully
cultivate the arts of generosity, kindness, prudence, love, humility, compassion,
gentleness, forgiveness, gratitude and ecological intelligence.
In its specifically modern form, ecological design has roots in the Romantic
rebellion against the more extreme forms of modernism, particularly the belief that
humans armed with science and a bit of technology were lords and masters of
Creation. Francis Bacon, perhaps the most influential of the architects of modern
science, proposed the kind of science that would reveal knowledge by putting
nature on the rack and torturing her secrets from her, a view still congenial to some
who have learned to say it more correctly. The science that grew from Bacon,
Galileo and Descartes overthrew older forms of knowing based on the view that we
are participants in the forming of knowledge and that nature is not dead (Mer-
chant, 1982). The result was a science based on the assumptions that we stand
apart from nature, that knowledge was to be judged by its usefulness in extending
human mastery over nature, and that nature is best understood by reducing it into
its components pieces. ‘The natural world’, in the words of philosopher E. A.
Burtt, ‘was portrayed as a vast, self-contained mathematical machine, consisting of
motions of matter in space and time and man with his purposes, feelings, and
secondary qualities was shoved apart as an unimportant spectator’ (1954, p104).
Our minds are so completely stamped by that particular kind of science that it is
difficult to imagine another way to know in which comparably valid knowledge