Ecological Design and Education 315design choices will require adaptive reuse or more intense and creative uses of exist-
ing infrastructure. Sometimes it will mean doing nothing at all, a choice that
requires a clearer and wiser distinction between our needs and wants.
What ecological designers can do, and all they can do, is to help reduce our
ecological impacts and buy us time to reckon with the deeper sources of our prob-
lems that have to do with age-old questions about how we relate to each other
across the boundaries and sometimes chasms of gender, ethnicity, nationality, cul-
ture and time and how we fit into the larger community of life. Ecological design,
as a healing art, is only a necessary, but insufficient part of a larger strategy of heal-
ing, health and wholeness which brings us to spirit.
Finally, design education is not purely secular. For designers it is no small thing
that humans are inescapably spiritual beings, but only intermittently religious.
Philosopher Erazim Kohak once noted, that ‘Humans can bear an incredible
degree of meaningful deprivation but only very little meaningless affluence’
(Kohak, 1984, p170). In the former condition most of us tend to grow, harden
and mature while being undone in the latter. This is not a case for deliberately
incurring misery which tends to multiply on its own with little assistance, but
rather to underscore our inevitable spiritual nature that is like water bubbling
upward from an artesian spring. Our only choice is not whether we are spiritual or
not but whether that energy is directed to authentic purposes or not.
Much of the modern world, however, has been assembled as if people were
machines, lacking any deeper needs for order, pattern and roots. Modern designers
filled the world with buildings, artifacts and systems divorced from their context
and living nature, and telling no story of their origins or place in the larger order
of things. They seem to exist as if parachuted down from some alien realm discon-
nected from ecology, history, culture and place. Ecological design, on the other
hand, is a process by which we become more and more rooted in a particular place
and citizens in the community of life in that place. It is a form of storytelling by
which buildings and landscapes and the uses we make of them artfully reveal the
larger story of which they are a part. Modern design seldom tells any story worth
hearing and hence fails to connect us to the nature, history and evolution of the
places in which we live and work. Designers as storytellers aim to speak to the
human spirit and helps ground our lives and labours in the celebration and aware-
ness of specific places and in the larger story of the human journey (Berry, 1988).
References
Abram D. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Pantheon
Benyus J. 1998. Biomimicry. New York: HarperCollins
Berry T. 1988. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books
Bortoft H. 1966. The Wholeness of Nature. Hudson, NY: The Lindisfarne Press
Burtt E A. 1954. The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science. New York: Doubleday
Capra F. 1996. The Web of Life. New York: Anchor