Ecological Design and Education 303perception bodily runs against the dominant strains of Western philosophy. Plato,
for illustration, has Socrates say that ‘I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open
country won’t teach me anything whereas men in the town do’ (Phaedrus, 479).
Plato’s world of ideal forms existed only in the abstract. Similarly, the Christian
heaven exists purely somewhere beyond earthly and bodily realities. Both reflected
the shifting balance between the animated sacred, participatory world and the
linear, abstract, intellectual world. Commenting on the rise of writing and the
priority of the text, Abram says that ‘the voices of the forest, and of the river began
to fade ... language loosen(ed) its ancient association with the invisible breath, the
spirit sever(ed) itself from the wind, and psyche dissociate(d) itself form the envi-
roning air’ (1996, p254). As a result, ‘human awareness folds in upon itself and the
senses – once the crucial site of our engagement with the wild and animate earth –
become mere adjuncts of an isolate and abstract mind’ (1996, p267).
Through the designed object we are invited to participate in seeing something
else, a larger reality. The creators of Stonehenge, I think, intended worshippers to
see not just circles of artfully arranged stone, but the cosmos above and maybe
within. The Parthenon is a temple dedicated to the goddess Athena, but also a visible
testimony to an ideal existing in mathematical harmonies, proportion and symmetry
discoverable by human reason. The builders of Gothic cathedrals intended not just
monumental architecture but a glimpse of heaven and a home for sacred presence.
For all of the crass, utilitarian ugliness of the factories, slums and glittering office
towers, the designers and builders of the fourth revolution intended to reveal a
world of abundance and human potentials in a world they otherwise deemed
uncertain and violent, ruled by the economic laws of the jungle.
Finally, the practice of ecological design is rooted in the emerging science of
ecology and the specific natural characteristics of specific places. The fifth revolu-
tion is not merely a more efficient recalibration of energy, materials and economy
in accord with ecological realities, but a deeper and more coherent vision of the
human place in nature. Ecological design is, in effect, the specific terms of a decla-
ration of peace with nature that begins in the science of ecology and the recogni-
tion of our dependence on the web of life (Capra, 1996). In contrast to the belief
that nature is little more than a machine and its parts merely resources, for design-
ers of the fifth revolution it is, as Aldo Leopold put it:
A fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains
are the living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it to the
soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is added by
absorption from the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and long-lived forests; but it is a
sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life. There is always a net
loss by downhill wash, but this is normally small and offset by the decay of rocks.
(Leopold, 1949, p216).Energy flowing through the ‘biotic stream’ moves ‘in long or short circuits, rapidly
or slowly, uniformly or in spurts, in declining or ascending volume’, what ecologists