Ecological Design and Education 309dereliction are diffuse and often can be deferred to some other persons and to some
later time, but they do not thereby disappear. The upshot is that much of our
apparent prosperity is phony and so too the intellectual and ideological justifica-
tions for it.
The application of short-term economics to architecture, in particular, has
been little short of disastrous. ‘The rich complexity of human motivation that
generated architecture’, in Richard Rogers’ words, ‘is being stripped bare. Building
is pursued almost exclusively for profit’ (1997, p67). By such logic we cannot
afford to design well and build for the distant future. The results have been evident
for a long time. In the mid-19th century, John Ruskin noted that ‘Ours has the
look of a lazy compliance with low conditions’ (1880/1989, p21). But even Ruskin
could not have foreseen the blight of suburban sprawl, strip development, urban
decay, driven by our near terminal love affair with the automobile and inability to
plan sensibly. The true costs, however, are passed on to others as ‘externalities’ thereby
privatizing the gains while socializing the costs. The truth is, as it has always been,
that a phony prosperity is no good economy at all. False economic reckoning has
caused us to lay waste to our countryside, abandon our inner cities and the poor,
and build auto-dependent communities that are contributing mightily to climatic
change and rendering us dependent on politically unstable regions for oil.
An economy judged by the narrow industrial standards of efficiency will
destroy values that it cannot comprehend. Measured as the output for a given level
of input, maximizing efficiency creates disorder, that is to say, inefficiency at higher
levels. The reasons are complex but have a great deal to do with our tendency to
confuse means with ends. As a result efficiency often becomes an end in itself while
the original purposes (prosperity, security, benevolence, reputation, etc.) are for-
gotten. The assembly line was efficient for the manufacturing firm, but its larger
effects on workers, communities and ecologies were often destructive and the
problems for which mass production was a solution have been compounded many
times over. Neighbourliness is certainly an inefficient use of time on any given day,
but not when considered as a design principle for communities assessed over
months and years. For engineers, freeways are efficient at moving people up to a
point, but they destroy communities, promote pollution, cause congestion, create
dependence on foreign oil and eliminate better alternatives including design for
access that precludes the need for transportation. WalMart, similarly, is an efficient
marketing enterprise, but eliminates its competitors and many things that make
for good communities, including jobs that pay decent wages. Success on such
terms will eventually destroy WalMart and a great deal more. And, of course,
nuclear weapons are wonderfully efficient and quick devices as well. Ecological
design, in contrast, implies a different standard of efficiency oriented toward ends,
not means, the whole, not parts, and the long term not the short term.
Fifth, design education must be grounded in an honest assessment of human
capabilities. Ecological design, like all human affairs, has to be carried out in the
full recognition of human limitations, including the discomfiting possibility that
we are incurably ignorant. T. S. Eliot put it this way: