She delves into it and she has one culprit –
DDT – this one particular pesticide that’s being
used to control the crops.
This leads to the idea that there is a silence
in the surroundings; that there is a loss of
biodiversity. It challenges the whole notion of
big agribusiness; the notion that you had of a
local family farm, say in the early 20th century.
It might have a diversity of crops, it might have
both cropping and animals, it might have a
richness in the sense of inputs to one that is
actually a monoculture of farming. Again you can
fast forward some of that into work that’s been
done on how you can make a very sustainable
organic farm – how to make a very small patch
of ground support far more food production than
you would get out of giant agribusiness.
The agribusiness was the target in her book.
Still to this day it’s one of the best pieces of
writing about scientific subjects – the proof
that there is a linkage between DDT and the
loss of biodiversity. Of course, it continues on
today with some pesticides being accused of
causing cancer and there have been massive
settlements in the United States in particular
for the use of glycosides.
So here are these two women who are
challenging the orthodoxy that comes out after
the Second World War, the massive growth
happening in what later became the OECD
countries. There was a background to what both
of them brought to the study, which I think is
really interesting when you consider an English
economist who started to look at not just the city
or the countryside, but the whole of the country
or indeed, the whole of an ecosystem. It was awoman called Barbara Ward who was not nearly
as well-known as Rachel Carson and Jane Jacobs,
perhaps because she was English rather than
American and she was from the wealthy upper
class, but she had trained as an economist. So
she starts to look at the issue of what ecosystems
can be analysed in terms of economic systems.
She comes to a very interesting conclusion in a
book that she writes and publishes in 1964 called
Spaceship Earth, which is based on this idea of
Earth as a closed system which in turn influences
such things as The Whole Earth Catalog, a book
published out of Menlo Park, San Francisco by
Stewart Brand, Lloyd Kahn and others.
It’s called Access to Tools and it’s basically
internet before the internet but what’s
interesting is they use a picture of the Earth
shot from space, the first time that NASA
releases an image shot from space of the whole
Earth is on the front cover of the second edition.
The Whole Earth Catalog is the catalogue – it
has a double meaning; it is for the whole of the
Earth but it’s also about the fact that we need to
preserve this one Spaceship Earth.
It’s mostly down to that very fact that it
grows but sustainability for the population was
ahead of the actual population numbers until
the 1960s. That’s the point I’m making – this is
the tipping point in the 1960s when we start to
see that the quality of life that you could have
is going to be constrained by the amount of
resources that you’re consuming.
The First World was relatively small at that
stage but now that large parts of the Third
World – South America, Africa in particular,
and most of Asia – are now rapidly catching upor overtaking some of what was considered to
be the First World, the pressure on resources
has become even more demonstrable.
Donella Meadows the ecologist completes the
circle of the four biggies from the beginning of the
60s to the end of the 60s and early 70s. Meadows
is putting it into some sort of context where
the key is in the title of the book The Limits to
Growth – can we have endless growth? No.
We’re on one singular planet, there’s a limit
to resources, there’s an economic limit to that
being established by the economics view of
it, there is a biological limit to it, and there’s
actually a social limit to it.
Jane Jacobs’ book is really talking about
what’s the quality of life in the city; is it worth
living in a city if you don’t get the qualities
that the urban fabric brings to you? Nearby
resources, nearby services, interactions with a
large number of people, the qualities that you
have in the city, so if you start to lose each of
those things because you get endless growth,
then it just becomes a system sustaining itself or
a system that becomes unsustainable.
Each one of those particular stories from that
10-year period now plays out. I think it repeats
itself again and again but it pays to go back to
those original four books that established the
reasons why. Some of it is a bit arcane, some of
it is passé, but if you read it then you realise that
the vast amount of material that we’re doing is
refining the arguments that have been laid out
in that 1960s explosion.
It is also an explanation of what happened
prior to the internet but with the distribution
of books on a massive scale, you’ve got theAbove Barbara Ward. Image courtesy of thegwpf.org (top left), Donella Meadows. Image courtesy of donellameadows.org (top middle), Jane Jacobs. Image courtesy of vox.com
(bottom left), Rachel Carson. Image courtesy of scholastic.com (bottom middle) and Tone Wheeler. Image courtesy of Tone Wheeler (right).ARChITeCTuRe & DesIgn /Promotion/ Jul-sep 201931ADQ3_030_032_Tone Wheeler_V1.indd 31 26/7/19 4:50 pm