312 Ecological Restoration and Design
by promoting mindfulness, transparency and ecological competence. Compared
to people of any other time, the public is less aware of how it is provisioned with
food, energy, water, materials, security and shelter, and how its wastes are handled.
Industrial design cloaked the ecological fine print of what are often little better
than Faustian bargains providing luxury and convenience now, while postponing
ruin to some later time. Ecological design, on the contrary, ought to demystify the
world, making us mindful of energy, food, materials, water and waste flows, which
is to say the ecological fine print by which we live, move and have our being.
Design is always a powerful form of education. Only the terminally pedantic
believe that learning happens just in schools and classrooms. The built environ-
ment in which we spend over 90 per cent of our lives is at least as powerful in
shaping our ideas and views of the world as anything learned in a classroom. Sub-
urbs, shopping malls, freeways, parking lots and derelict urban spaces have consid-
erable impacts on how we think, what we think about and what we can think
about. The practice of design as a form of public instruction is a jailbreak of sorts,
liberating the ecological imagination from the tyranny of imposed forms and rela-
tionships characteristic of the fossil fuel powered industrial age. Architecture, land-
scape architecture and planning carried out as a form of public education aims to
instruct about energy, materials, history, rhythms of time and seasons, and the
ecology of the places in which we live. It would help us become mindful of eco-
logical relationships and engage our places creatively.
Six, awareness of human limitations might cause us, perhaps, to look more
favourably on past societies and vernacular design skills created by people at the
periphery of power, money and influence. The truth is that practical adaptation to
the ecologies of particular places over long periods of time has often resulted in
spectacularly successful models of ecological design (Rudofsky, 1964). It may well
be that the ecological design revolution will be driven, at least in part, by experi-
ence accumulated from the periphery not from the centre, and led by people skilled
at solving the practical problems of living artfully by their wits and good sense in
particular places. The success of vernacular design across all cultures and times
underscores the possibility that design intelligence may be more accurately meas-
ured at the level of the community or culture, rather than at the individual level.
Seven, in modern pedagogy, a great deal of art and philosophy has been cut off
from the world of nature. The aesthetic standard for ecological design, on the con-
trary, reconnects to the natural world so artfully as to cause no ugliness, human or
ecological, somewhere else or at some later time. The standard, in other words,
requires a more robust sense of aesthetics that rises above the belief that beauty is
wholly synonymous with form alone. Every great designer from Vitruvius through
Frank Lloyd Wright demonstrated that beauty in the large sense had to do with the
effects of buildings on the human spirit and our sense of humanity, and their
impacts on specific places. But the standards for beauty must be measured on a
global scale and longer time horizon so that beauty includes the upstream physical
effects at wells, mines and forests where materials originate as well as the down-
stream effects on climate, human health and ecological resilience. The things