Ecological Design and Education 305there is no larger theory of ecological design, nor is there a textbook formula that
works for practitioners across many different fields and at varying scales. And nei-
ther should we presume agreement on what it means for humankind to become a
‘plain member and citizen of the biotic community’. In other words, we have a
compass but no map. Architect Samuel Mockbee, founder of the Rural Studio,
enjoined his students working with the poor in Hale County, Alabama, only to
make their work ‘warm, dry, and noble’. Warm and dry are easy for the most part
because they are felt somatically, noble is hard because it requires us to make judge-
ments about what we ought to do relative to some standard higher than creature
comfort. But in the best sense of the word it is synonymous with decent, worthy,
generous, magnificent, proud and resilient. And it ought to be synonymous with
ecological design as well.
Ecology, the ‘subversive science’, begins with the recognition of our practical
connections to the physical world, but it does not stop there. The awareness of the
many ways by which we are connected to the web of life would lead intelligent and
scientifically literate people to protect nature and the conditions necessary to it for
reasons of self-interest. But our knowledge, always incomplete and often wrong, is
mostly inadequate to the task of knowing what’s in our interest, whether we wish
to define that as ‘highest’ or ‘lowest’, let alone discerning exactly what parts of
nature we must accordingly protect and how to do it. Science notwithstanding,
often we do not know what we are doing and why. More subversive still are ques-
tions concerning the interests and rights of lives and life across the boundaries of
species and time. Since they cannot speak for themselves, their only advocates will
be those willing to speak on their behalf.
There are many clever arguments used to explain why we should or should not
be concerned about those whose lives and circumstances would be affected by our
action or inaction. Like so many tin soldiers, arrayed across the battlefield of
abstract intellectual combat, they assault frontally or by flank, retreat only to
regroup, and charge again, each battle giving rise to yet another. But in the end, I
think, such questions will not be decided by intellectual combat and argumenta-
tion, however smart, but rather more simply and profoundly by affection – all of
those human emotions that we try to capture in words like compassion, sympathy
and love. Love, in other words, neither requires nor hinges on intellectual argu-
ment. It is a claim that we recognize as valid but for reasons we could never describe
satisfactorily. In the end it is a nameless feeling that we accept as both a limitation
on what we do and a gift we offer. Pascal’s observation that the heart has reasons
that reason does not know sums the matter. Love is a gift but the giver expects no
return on the investment and that defies logic, reason and even arguments about
selfish genes.
So, after all of the intellectualization and clever arguments, whether we choose
to design with nature or not will come down to a profoundly simple matter of
whether we love deeply enough, artfully enough, and carefully enough to preserve
the web on which all life now and in the future depends. Ecological design is sim-
ply an informed love applied to the dialogue between humankind and natural