308 Ecological Restoration and Design
place, form and materials. Good design feels right and is a pleasure to behold and
experience for reasons that we understand at an intuitive level, but have difficulty
explaining.
Third, all design involves decisions about how society provides food, energy,
shelter, materials, water and waste cycling, and distributes risks, costs and benefits
and is thereby unavoidably political. Design education, by the same logic, is polit-
ical having to do with decisions about energy, forests, land, water, biological diver-
sity, resources and the distribution of wealth, risks and benefits. Often cast as
‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’, such decisions in our time are, in fact, often about how
the present generation orients itself to the interests of its children and grandchil-
dren. One can arrive at a decent regard for their prospects as either a conservative
or as a liberal. These are not opposing positions so much as they are different sides
of a single coin. The point is that harmonizing social and economic life with eco-
logical realities will require choices about energy technologies, agriculture, land
use, settlement patterns, materials, the handling of wastes and water that are ines-
capably political and will distribute risks and benefits in one way or another.
Further, as the Greeks understood, design entails choices that enhance or retard
civic life and the prospects for citizenship. But in our time ‘We are witnessing the
destruction of the very idea of the inclusive city’ and with it the arts of civility,
citizenship and civilization (Rogers, 1997, p10). By including or excluding possi-
bilities to engage each other in convivial dialogue the creators of urban spaces
enhance or diminish civility, urbanity and the civic prospect. It is no accident, I
think, that crime, loneliness and low participation became epidemic as spaces such
as town squares, street markets, front porches, corner pubs and parks were sacri-
ficed to the automobile, parking lots and urban sprawl. Better design alone cannot
cure these problems, but they can help to engage people with their places as
thoughtful and engaged citizens.
Fourth, ecological design implies a better and more robust economics. In an
age much devoted to the theology of the market, disciples of the conventional
wisdom believe it imprudent to design ecologically if the costs are even marginally
more than conventional design. Based on incomplete and highly selective account-
ing, that view is almost always wrong because it overlooks the fact that we – or
someone – sooner or later will pay the full costs of bad design, one way or another.
In other words, society pays for ecological design whether it gets the benefits of it
or not. Honest accounting, accordingly, requires that we keep the boundaries of
consideration as wide as possible over the long term and have the wit to deduct the
collateral benefits that come from doing things right. For example, ignoring the
costs of wars fought for ‘cheap’ oil, or those of climate change, air pollution and
the health effects of urban sprawl, an SUV is cheap enough. But price and cost
should not be confused. It is the height of folly to believe that we can eliminate
forests, pollute, squander resources, erode soils, destroy biological diversity, remodel
the biogeochemical cycles of the Earth, and create ugliness, human and ecological,
without consequence. The truth is that, sooner or later, the full costs will be paid
one way or another. The problem, however, is that the costs of environmental