304 Ecological Restoration and Design
call food chains. For designers, the important point is that the internal processes of
the biotic community, the ecological books in effect, must balance so that energy
used or dissipated by various processes of growth must be replenished. Leopold
proposed three basic ideas:
1 that land is not merely soil;
2 that the native plants and animals kept the energy circuit open; others may or
may not;
3 that man-made changes are of a different order than evolutionary changes, and
have effects more comprehensive than is intended or foreseen. (Leopold, 1949,
p218)
Ecological design, as Leopold noted, begins in the recognition that nature is not
simply dead material or simply a resource for the expression of human wants and
needs, but rather ‘a community of soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively:
the land’ of which we are a part (Leopold, 1949, p204). But Leopold did not stop
at the boundary of science and ethics, he went on to draw out the larger implica-
tions. For reasons of both necessity and right, the recognition that we are members
in the community of life ‘changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the
land-community to plain member and citizen of it’ (1949, p204). The ‘upshot’ is
Leopold’s classic statement that ‘a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integ-
rity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends other-
wise’ (1949, pp224–225). We will be a long time understanding the full implications
of that creed, but Leopold, late in his life, was beginning to ponder the larger social,
political and economic requisites of a fully functioning land ethic.
Like Leopold’s land ethic, ecological design represents a practical marriage of
ecologically enlightened self-interest with the recognition of the intrinsic values of
natural systems. Once consummated, however, the marriage branches out into a
family of possibilities. Economics rooted in the realities of ecology, for example,
requires the preservation of natural capital of soils, forests and biological diversity;
which is to say economies that operate within the limits of the earth’s carrying
capacity (Daly, 1996). An ecological politics requires the recalibration of the com-
plexities and timescales of ecosystems with the conduct of the public business. An
ecological view of health would begin with the recognition that the body exists
within an environment, not as a kind of isolated machine (Kaptchuk, 2000). Reli-
gion grounded in the operational realities of ecology would build on the human
role as stewards and the obligation to care for the Creation (Tucker, 2003). An
ecological view of agriculture would begin with the realities of natural systems,
aiming to mimic the way natural systems function (Jackson, 1980). An ecological
view of business/industry would aim to create solar powered industrial and com-
mercial ecologies so that every waste product cycles as an input in some other
system (McDonough and Braungart, 2002).
In whatever manifestation, the goal of ecological design is to go ‘from con-
queror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it’ (Leopold). But